Earlier this month, or maybe last month, my based-somewhere-in-the-Czech-Republic sister emailed me requesting my mailing address. This seemed odd, mostly because I don't know what she'd have to send me. I don't have a birthday coming up. She can't send me Czech booze through the mail (though it'd be amazing if she did. And she probably could.) I really doubt that it's worth her time to make a CD or something, "just because she was thinking about me."

So, basically, I forgot about it.

Anyway, I arrived home, slightly tipsy and slightly...melancholy...on Friday night. Checked the mail. Sports Illustrated. An envelope, clearly from my sister. (Her handwriting, after all.)

Anyway, the letter made me all giggly and happy, because she's a pretty amazing kid. Actually, first, the envelope made me all giggly and happy. Homemade. Misspelled my street address. Listed my name, then the subtitle, "Bro #2," which probably refers to my a) location in the age hierarchy, b) ranking in the "how much I like my brothers" hierarchy, and c) ranking in the family cuteness hierarchy. Also, I've always liked her handwriting, because it's distinctly un-girly.

Then, the contents of the envelope. Remarkable. A photo cut out of a magazine. Probably 5" by 7", or so. A picture of a dude on a bike, with a path receding into the background. The dude kind of looks like the drummer from Green Day, with white gloves and a black derby hat and a beige plaid jacket. And paler, too. (On the back, some record reviews, it seems. Unrelated, though a neat coincidence, because I like record reviews.) The text is written only on the path in the picture, from narrow to wide as the path moves to the forefront. In her scrawly, distinctly un-girly handwriting. Visually, pretty neat.

Then, the textual contents of the letter. Simply, "I'm doing well. Great. Incredible. You should be jealous of me (Ed: Here's the coolest part.) - although you should be content in your own life and shouldn't wish me harm." (Ed: !) And it continues from there. She writes about picking fruit. And going on walks. And generally being commune-al. And then she wishes me a healthy voice, I think. Downside: Not signed "Love," though I guess that's not her way.

Basically, the letter was amazing. Made me happy for quite a bit of time. I brought it into work on Saturday, kept it in my pocket, and showed it off to at least two coworkers. I think they just think that she's weird, and I guess they're right.

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I'm pretty excited because The Boy's coming up for a few days. Actually, just a day and a half. Tuesday night. All of Wednesday. Out Thursday morning. Packed schedule, kind of. Or, rather, packed Wednesday.

We'll be venturing north of the Ring Fingernail, perhaps to the Ring Fingertip, to spend the afternoon on a lake with my aunt and uncle and my cousins, who are renting a house out there. Since my grandma died in the spring of 2004, we've not a had a full-out family Christmas, as we had for the previous...twentysomething years. The incentive was gone for a lot of my dad's siblings, it seems, for obvious reasons. (We've had really nice Christmases the last two years, nuclear ones, but something's been missing, too.) Anyway, I've probably seen this family twice since then, once for Christmas Eve dinner in 2004 and once right around New Year's Day this year, and they've always been fun. In fact, I've probably seen them a few more times than that, but not many more.

And the oldest is going to college sometime in August, so that's a pretty good topic of conversation. And the youngest has a cell phone, though it's officially the "Family" phone because, according to my uncle's email, "she's too young to have her own cell phone." I discern that it's hers, of course. So that's a pretty good topic of conversation, too.

So I'm looking forward to doing the beach thing or the hangout thing or whatever, really.

So that's Wednes-day. Wednes-night takes us to the house of coworker who grew up on a lake by our ballpark. "All Staff Grill and Drink on a Pontoon Boat Night." Yes, I've been looking forward to ASGADOAPBN for a long time, since we started discussing it three weeks ago. I think The Boy will enjoy himself. If he doesn't, everyone else probably will, so I guess he'll get over it.

Tuesday, I don't know what's planned. I do know that I've not properly cleaned, so maybe we can clean on Tuesday night.

The Boy's making pretty big sacrifices to come to ASGADOAPBN. I think he has to drive back to the CHI slightly hungover on Thursday morning, only to go hang out with his friend who is also a girl and her family of FIBs at some lake in Wisconsin that night. So he's taking a risk by making the trip way up north - he might be in less-than-ideal conditions for his third trip in a week.

Ahh, to be young, unemployed, and (pretty soon) rich.

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I've grown pretty comfortable referring The Boy as "one of my best friends" in the past few years, and started using phrases like, "we're really close" when telling non-stories about my family to others. I think that's pretty neat, right?

But I also think it's pretty neat that myself and my two brothers and my sister are all pretty different, though The Boy and I actually are pretty similar. But I'd think that there's more variance in our family than most.

Anyway, the previously-mentioned nuclear Christmases of the last two years are about the only times that all of the siblings and the parents are together, so the nuclear Christmases are pretty cool, too.

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(I was going to add a part here about how a coworker's mom and her mom's boyfriend were in town over the weekend, and about how she clearly wasn't looking forward to seeing either of them, and about how she clearly wasn't going to even be able to scam groceries out of her mom, and about how it's pretty clear that she clearly doesn't like or respect her mom, and about how I happened to witness an awkward coworker-to-mom's boyfriend hug, and about how terrible it was. And then I was going to write about how neat it is that my parents are still married and seem to enjoy each other's company, and about how neat it is that I think they're pretty cool people. But then I decided that that would be pretty sappy, and that this post has already been pretty sappy. So, instead, I just wrote it in the form of a run-on sentence or six. Thanks for reading that part, maybe.)

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I had a pretty amazing lunch on Saturday. I was working in our team store, folding t-shirts or something. I had brought my tuna casserole and a few peaches and some carrots in for lunch, but I realized that I didn't particularly want to eat any of them at that point in time. It was sunny and pretty warm outside, and I wanted to go somewhere where I could pay seven bucks and have a tuna sandwich with a pickle and some potato chips on the side, and eat under an umbrella on a plastic chair.

Understand that I never eat any lunch except for the lunch I bring in. Too expensive, and never enjoyable enough to justify the seven bucks. I cook my lunch days in advance. (The tuna casserole, which I'll finish Monday, was cooked the previous Tuesday. Eww.) I've eaten lunch out twice in my three-and-a-half months in The Ring Fingernail, on my first day and on a whim a few weeks ago. Neither worked out particularly well.

So I asked my coworker. (The same coworker that's hosting ASGADOAPBN. I don't know how many stories have to be told about a given individual until the person's given an official RedHotHalos nickname. As for now, a generic title suffices.)

Me: "Hey. What are you doing for lunch?"
CW: "Well. I'm going to go home, and change. And I'll probably curl my hair."
Me: "You wanna go eat somewhere instead?"
CW: "Hmmm. What kind of place are you thinking about?"
Me: "Pretty much somewhere where I can eat a sandwich on a patio."
CW: "Hmmm. [Pause.] Hey. I've got an idea."
Me: "Yeah?"
CW: "Why don't we go to my house? We can eat outside. I've got sandwiches."

Oh man. So we made turkey sandwiches and a salad and ate on the beach. Lunch, barefoot, and less than four minutes from the office. Pretty amazing.

Crap like that didn't happen in The Port.

Also, I then ate my lunch for dinner. And, therefore, avoided having a hot dog or a slice of pizza.

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Nick Swisher is one of my favorite baseball players. He was pretty hilarious in Moneyball. He hits home runs. He seems to be friendly. He seems to like people. (Also, I made him a late-round pick in my fantasy baseball draft, and he's played first base every week for my about-to-fall-out-first-place team, because I found out only after the draft that Travis Hafner was strictly DH-eligible. But Swisher carried it for a time.)

I base my opinion of Swisher only on his portrayal in Moneyball and his portrayal in a recent Sports Illustrated article. (Week of the U.S. Open. Phil Mickelson hunched over after a massive choke job on the cover.)

There's a particularly fantastic sentence in the article. Particularly fantastic, of course, because of the end of it:

"So what you see is what you get: a big, joyful hitter who grew up sleeping on bat racks when his dad was a minor league manager, was recruited as a strong safety by Notre Dame, plays beer pong at the house he shares with righthanders Rich Harden, Joe Blanton and Huston Street, and has Oakland poised for yet another second half run."

Worth something, right?

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The R/DS's best friend from college was in town for a few days this week. Came in Thursday night, spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights here, and left early, early this morning for the CHI. (He saw Zambrano complete the sweep this afternoon.)

For the record, he seemed nice enough. He also seemed odd. And was definitely a bit creepy-looking, owing to a bad goatee. Bad goatees are, by definition, creepy. (This doesn't stop me from working towards one, like, right now.)

Anyway, I didn't have much expsoure to the R/DS' friend.

Two highlights:

- An hour or so before game on Saturday, in the broadcast booth. Normal conversation between R/Ds and friend, probably about the Phillies or something. Then, our of nowhere, they start trading Mel Brooks movie lines. (I didn't know the quotes, of course, but used context clues to determine that they were Mel Brooks movie quotes.) It was Dorky Movie One-Upsmanship. Outstanding.

- Saturday night, I was home to clean up a bit before going out. R/DS was playing a video game. R/DS' friend was playing Gameboy. The only conversation was the R/DS telling his friend about the video game he was playing, and how he created our club's roster on the game. I don't think that the friend even gave him any indication that he cared - no "yeah?"s or "uh-huh"s or anything like this. Just Gameboy nosies. So I guess the R/DS is as odd and unnatural around his "best friends" as he is around me. Reassuring, in a way. Or terrible.

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WIDiRVoFOW

This Week's Reason: He says "You know" all the time. All the freakin' time.

Example: (quoting loosely, more for spirit than content) "I'm not looking forward to the trip to [insert small Midwest town that hosts baseball] because, you know, I've heard they changed the hotel. The hotel last year, you know, was pretty good. Because, you know, there was, you know, an Applebee's that basically, you know, shared the parking lot with the hotel. And if you were willing, you know, to walk a half-mile or so, you know, there's a strip mall with a pretty good selection. And, you know, they just built a new Wal-Mart, you know, on the east side. Well, not that new, but, you know, just over a year old. And that's right by the hotel, too."

I'm considering saying, "I didn't know that" or "How could I have known?" every time he says "You know." It'd probably be pretty annoying.

What's amazing is that he never, you know, says it on the air, I don't think.

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I got home from the ballpark early tonight, around 10 or so. I was going to clean, write, and sleep. Three extended (and good) phone calls, a four-minute bout of close-eyedness, and this later, it's one-freakin'-forty. Good night.

The phone calls were totally worth it, though.

I learned that Gurs was lucky enough to see The Futureheads tonight. And that my friend T-Bone is getting married in September. He's forty-something, and it's his second marriage, but he's pretty geeked. I'm also geeked on his behalf.