summer snapshots

nothing says summer like a hot, humid night, standing barefoot in the kitchen with the windows open, fans blowing, and cutting up strawberries for strawberry shortcake. luke would rather have ice cream than baked goods, but i like to bake, so this week when we ran out of ice cream, i decided to take the opportunity to make strawberry shortcake for dessert. it was delicious.

mr. williams gave me some squash, lima beans and peppers our of his garden this week. he's having trouble with the deer eating his tomatoes, too. we all are. but we did enjoy the fruits of his labor (yum, squash chips), and hopefully soon we'll have some of our own. When we got back we found several spaghetti squash growing, along with some watermelons, okra and pumpkins. gardening is pretty exciting.

every baseball game the dc lottery pays for two lucky fans who are sitting way in the top sections to move down into the seats right behind home plate. every game luke and i attend we look at those lucky fans up on the big screen as clint (the announcer) introduces them to the masses, and beth and kenny (two of the nats pack) escort them down to their new seats. every game we think "we wish that was us...".

well, my friends, let me tell you a story. last week luke and i went to a normal nationals game, bought our normal $5 tickets and sat in our normal, incredibly far away (but still fun) seats. in our nats shirts, we anxiously awaited the start of the game, i filled out my score book, and we watched as the first batter came up to bat. then, out of the corner of our eye, we saw the camera guy come up the stairs and look over to section 401. then over to section 402. "oohhh" we thought "the lucky seat upgrade!" we fought the urge to say "us! us! pick us!" but instead concentrated on the game and keeping score like nothing weird was happening. then we saw clint. he walked up the stairs and looked around. he searched in section 402. "there are no fans over there!" we whispered to each other. "he should look over here!" as if he heard us, his head turned. he smiled and walked over to us. "how are you doing today, folks?" he asked, with his cheesy grin. "can we give you some seats to the diamond club?"

yes. we were the lucky seat upgrade of the game. after talking to clint about moving to different seats, the nats, his life history, our life history, he introduced us to the masses at nats park. told everyone how we were fans, and how they picked us because of our nats shirts and because of how we kept score, and then beth (who is our hero, because apparently she was the one who told clint to pick us) and kenny led us down to our lucky seats. so close that we could see the the sweat spot on the homeplate umpire's back get bigger as the game went on, see the ball release from the pitchers hand, yell with confidence at the ump when he called a ball a strike (or vice-versa, depending on who was batting), and cheer for ryan zimmerman to get a home run and feel like he might actually hear us this time.



it.was.awesome.

along with this lucky seat upgrade came padded seats and $35 to spend on food (which was ordered from and brought right to your seat...) so we sat in those padded seats

and drank (crazy expensive) frozen margaritas out of ridiculously large nats glasses.

and just felt pretty lucky and happy, in general, that we got to experience the dc lottery natstown lucky seat upgrade.

so that's my story for today.

tonight whitney and i are running a bastille day 4-mile race. i'll let you know if we live to tell about it.