So… I drove out to Boston to see my first game at Fenway. Peter was out there, and he and I were meeting up for the Monday night game.

The game started out pretty good, and got progressively better. Here are the final few pitches of the game.

So, the place went nuts, myself included, as Lester had just pitched a no-hitter. It was amazing.

As requested, in response to my list of things that I hated, I now have a list of things that I really, really like… perhaps slightly modified to hit that PG-13 rating. Having had some time to think through all this, it seems to me that there are far more things in this world to like then there are to hate… it’s just a bit easier to focus on the latter sometimes.

• A high, far-off fly ball that, if I sprint as fast as I can I might be able to dive and just barely catch it.
• Looking outside in the morning and seeing a handful of different kinds of birds, a number of squirrels, and a family of bunnies all enjoying the seeds from my birdfeeders.
• Spectacular lightning and thunder storms (that do NOT knock out power)
• A long, very warm shower.
• Coming home after a long vacation or trip, and sleeping in my own bed again, with the anticipation of seeing my friends the next day.
• A book so entertaining to read or listen to that all other activities (sleeping, eating, working, etc) must be put on hold until its conclusion. (Jurassic Park!)
• When you get a brand new hoodie, and you haven’t washed it yet, and the inside is so incredibly soft and fuzzy that you’re pretty sure once you put it on that there’s no way you are ever going to be taking it off again.
• Finishing a 3 or 4 mile run, and feeling like I could run another 3 or 4 no problem.
• Cleaning my entire house before company comes over, and having the place look fantastic.
• Dinner and games with family/friends. This might be my favorite thing in the world.
• That feeling right after you’ve finished mowing the whole lawn, and your yard suddenly looks really nice.. and you think “I own this.”
• Seeing a movie and having luke-warm expectations, and being so blown away by the film and its message that your day to day life from that point on is actually affected.
• A really, really awful pun delivered in an almost apologetic way.
• Coffee/Caffeine!
• When something is so funny that I catch myself laughing out loud for a long time while I’m sitting there by myself
• Those days when, for reasons unclear to me, I [believe that I] can play the guitar really, really well, and feel like a rock star.
• Randomly coming across a historical documentary on TV about a person or event I know just a little about, and being instantly obsessed with knowing all that I can about that person or event, and everything related.
• That point in a relationship when you no longer have to mentally prepare yourself before calling her.
• A warm, comfortable bed, and the forbidden sleep that comes after you hit the snooze…again
• Drinking cold soda from a glass bottle
• The Legend of Zelda
• When you’re coding, and you wish there was a certain function in a given language, and so you just write it in, planning on defining it later, and it turns out it already exists, and is named exactly what you called it.
• Pat Hughes and Ron Santo, no static, and the next few hours free.
• A lazy outfield shot that ought to be a single.. but I know I can stretch to a double if I really sprint.
• The serenity and comfort that comes, even at the very worst of time, from the understanding that God exists, and loves me despite my repeated failings.

• Milk that’s at the expiration date, and you’re not quite sure if it smells like how milk is supposed to smell, and you’re not quite hungry/thirsty enough to just risk it, but you don’t want to throw it away if it’s still good… so you just stand there, repeatedly sniffing the milk.
• Movie Trailers that show scenes from the end of the movie, so halfway through the movie you remember that scene, and realize exactly how the movie is going to end.
• Squirrels that aren’t content with just taking food from the bird feeder, but have to break the feeder, so that birds can’t use it anymore.
• An advertisement or trailer that takes a popular piece of music, and then cuts out snippets in the middle of the piece to make it fit into the time alloted… leaving the piece sounding jerky and the lyrics (if there are lyrics) completely non-sensical.
• Tyra Banks
• When you are home alone, and you have absolutely no motivation to do anything at all, and it’s still much too early to go to bed, but the idea of doing anything, even just watching TV, sounds so awful that you find yourself wandering from room to room desperately searching for nothing at all.
• Television shows that are canceled midway through a fairly complex story arc. Some people require closure.
• Cherry Flavored Coffee.
• Truck commercials that advertise how great their truck is by either doing something that the truck can not physically do or something you are expressly forbidden to do.
• When you are lying in bed trying to sleep, and then you see a spider run across the covers… You dash for something to kill it with/turn on the lights, and when you return, the spider is gone… and you realize you will not be sleeping that evening.
• When a TV show advertises an upcoming episode using different clips than they did before, so you think it’s a new episode, but it’s really a rerun from a while ago.
• Dealing with health insurance.
• When “this should just take a second” is still not finished hours later…
• Remembering that you were boiling water on the stove just in time to discover a completely empty saucepan sitting on the burner.
• Coming up with the absolute perfect retort approximately 4 months after it would have been useful.
• Waiting for the phone.
• In Video games, when a final boss has an unblockable attack, so if he/it happens to do that move, you die… and you just have to keep playing until you manage to kill the thing before that move shows up. How is that fun?
• Scientology
• About 50% of “Red Sox Nation”… the half that joined about 3 seconds after they won the World Series in 2004.
• Mayonnaise
• Comment Spammers. Is there anything more unquestionably evil?
• Local News that decides that a High School football game is more important than something like a war in the Middle East.
• “A Very Special ER.”
• Comcast/Verizon Customer Service
• MTV