The day started with an early lunch with my immediate family (dad, step-mother, brother, etc), though the girls were away for the weekend with their mother. After lunch we caught a movie (War of the Worlds).
The movie was good, but I'm still debating if it lived up to the hype. There was a lot of build-up throughout the movie about how grim the planetary situation was, but then the end seemed a bit abrupt. I'll claim slight ignorance here as I've never read the book and it's been since I was a teenager that I saw the original movie, so it may just be that all was as it was supposed to be. With the exception of the Tim Robbins character, I thought everything was done well. I don't mean to imply Mr. Robbins did a bad job. I just felt that character seemed out of place and took way too much main-plot time from the movie. Again, maybe I've just missed something here. Lastly, parents, don't be fooled by the PG-13 rating. With the amount of swearing and killing and blood in the movie, it should definitely be an R rating instead. As Darby has done well recently with PG-13 movies (ROTS and Batman) I thought this one might be okay and I let her go see it with her mom the day before. Having now seen it, I realize that was a mistake (Update: Darby concurs). If I had seen it first, there's no way Darby would have then seen it (oops).
After the movie we had a couple hours to kill before then going to the ballpark. We had decided at lunch to go see the ballgame and the fireworks thereafter. We came up with this seemingly great idea of having my aunt leave her car at the ballpark (i.e. good parking for the game) while we all jammed into my dad's minivan. The idea was that my dad (not a [non-automotive] sports fan and so skipping the ballgame) would drop us off at the game directly, and that, since we had good parking, we would get out of there quickly.
The ballgame was pretty good (brought back memories of having to do this back in high school at the Vet in Philly) except for the fact that the home team lost. And the fireworks were decent. There was more than 13,000 in attendance, which is interesting because I'm under the impression that the capacity of our ballpark is 12,000. But then, I've never seen the left- and right-field grassy knowles quite so packed. It's also interesting that all the people in the restaurant (also where we had lunch) and on the adjacent parking garage (this pic was taken before several floors were packed with people) were not factored into the 13,000+ figure, so I wonder how many actually saw the game.
My remaining curiosity about the game lies in what, exactly, the third-base coach said to the Redhawk, because he sure got motivated and scored. Or crossed the plate anyway. Or maybe both, but we're not going there. Though I wonder if she does consulting. My third-base skills could use some work.
As it turns out, our great parking idea was a travishamockery. We waited in absolute stillness-of-traffic for thirty minutes before deciding to abort. We re-parked and went to get some ice cream. Trouble is, the ice cream place had just closed. So we went to Sonic instead. Only we nearly got killed.
Being oblivious apparently runs in the family, as we all walked right into the Sonic and sat down at the only empty table left in the place. It wasn't until AFTER we sat down that we noticed there was a (rather lengthy) line for free tables. For the next ten minutes at least we got rather dirty looks from those that were waiting for the table we took from them.
But we got our due. We ended up being in Sonic for more than an hour. They were so busy and behind that the wait was something like 20-minutes minimum (and we just ordered drinks and ice cream), but then their computers went down so they had to walk around and re-take everyone's orders by hand, which lengthened the delay. They ended up giving everyone in the very packed facility their orders for free! Cool for us, but that has to suck for their bottom line.
While Steph got to laugh at me via text-message (she was at the same game, but beat us home... and she lives farther), at least the whole ice cream ordeal kept us from sucking gas fumes in traffic. Though there are definitely things I would have done differently in retrospect.
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