i love this town

I attended four very informative conference sessions today.

But the big news is our visit to Yankee Stadium to watch the home team beat the White Sox, 5-1.

Great things about tonight's outside activity:

1. Riding the subway. I love it. The people, the smells, the sound, and the crazy notion that you can go underground and in a very few moments, emerge into the sunlight at the place you want to be. Did you know there is a subway station that exits into Yankee Stadium?

2. Only four more games in Yankee Stadium until the season ends and it is torn down to be replaced by a parking lot, and a new stadium will be built in the currently existing parking lot. Is that brilliant or what? People can say what they want about Yankee Stadium being a lousy place to watch a ball game, but it's really a great place to see a game.

3. Baseball food. Yep, we had hotdogs and soda. The Utah version of baseball food. Dang tasty.

4. Did you know that there is a lot of group participation singing at major league baseball games including God Bless America by Kate Smith, all kinds of little bits of music between plays, Take me out to the Ballgame and what has to be the favorite of every fan, YMCA, which the ground crew dance to while raking the baselines between innings? And who could forget (or stop hearing it over and over in my head) Frank Sinatra singing, over and over, at the end of the game, 'Start Spreading the News', and repeating the last line--If I can make it there, I'll make it, (hip bump, hip bump) anywhere, it's up to you (Rockette's kick), New (kick), York (kick), Newwwwwahh Yorrrrrrk.

5. LaGuardia Airport is real close to Yankee Stadium--or at least I think it is because planes, big planes, kept taking off over the stadium, causing me to worry momentarily that the planes were on a course that might cause them to fly into the MetLife blimp.

6. We took photos at the game, but I still haven't figured out how to download them onto the computer, so for now, I'll post my drawing that shows very clearly my view of the game.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, we were sitting in the top tier, left field, row J, which would have been pretty great--and was pretty great--except that I forgot my glasses and my drawing is pretty much what I could see. The little gray blobs are the White Sox, the blue blobs are the umps, and the white uniform with the pin stripes that you can barely see (who is in the somewhat difficult to see red box near home plate) is Jason Giambi--the guy who is required to take drug tests to see if he's on the steroids, and since that all came up, he has, for some reason, gotten smaller and less able to hit the long ball. (Okay, I couldn't really see him clearly enough to tell if he's gotten smaller, but he wasn't hitting the ball very well at all tonight.)

The weather was perfect for a game, the fans were typical Yankee fans, the hot dogs were ideal for a baseball game, the subway was just the way I remembered. Well worth the price of admission.