charlesbreland.com

so, the weekend of june 3 i headed up to dc to hang out with my man j hen and his familia. it was my first time actually meeting the kids, and the first time seeing elizabeth since i spent about a day with them 5 years ago. needless to say, i thought he had made up the whole wife and kid thing to try and impress us. i was convinced he was using child models and trick photography to create the illusion of a family.

anyway, i arrive in friday evening and we head to pick up his friend eddie and then straight out to a baseball game. my freakin head is about to explode, b/c as you all know by now my ears won’t depressurize after flights. this bred sever ADD, so i was pretty out of it and just sort of followed them onto a train and through a crowd of people into the stadium.

the game was amazing.

i’m not sure who won or lost, but i know i had a good time – actually that’s a lie, the nat’s won in extra innings, which fully supported a theory that jeff and i espouse that bud selig has mandated that baseball in dc be a success and that each game this year must be a close game won by the nationals. btw, this would be a good time to tell you this will be a looooong blog due to the number of pictures i’m sharing with jeff here.

oh, and here’s the rest of the stadium

so we head out of the game to a few bars in the capital hill area. jeff, maybe you can post the name, but we ended up at some subterranean grog-joint where heard such statements as “i’m in intelligence…..well, i’d rather not say for who” and saw things like the picture below.

i did not get a picture of eddie doing a body shot off of jeff’s stomach. if it had happened, i would have taken a picture, and it would be here.

anyway, we were out til about 4 am or something, so we decided against our early morning tee time and instead spent the day with the family.

here are jeff’s girls caroline (the younger) and sophie (the one using my cell phone).

we went to glen echo and rode the carousel

btw, thats jeff’s wife elizabeth making sure sophie stays on the horse. i had ridden the previous round and while i am not sure if it was the inner ear disorder or the alcohol from the night before, but i do know i am not cut out to ride horses – particularly horses that run in circles while loud music plays and lights flash. i almost had an epileptic seizure!

anyway, the place was fun. it had a cute old amusement park meets hippie campground kind of feel to it.

caroline wasn’t too intersted in it, though. here she thinks about the privatization of social security while lightly nibbling on her glasses like an erudite college professor

we then headed over to the national cathedral. i had never been and found it quite lovely. the gardens were nice, the building was impressive and the grounds were pretty cool. we picked up sandwiches at “jetty’s” which i can’t possibly recommend highly enough. btw, you’d think you’d never ever feel good about having spent $4 for a yogurt cup with granola…..you’d be wrong. we then had a picnic outside the cathedral.

here are a couple of shots of the girls from the picnic.

not pictured are the evil black squirrels which i found quite frightening. luckily sophie protected me from both them, and the dragons she was quite certain lived at the cathedral, so i didn’t have to be scared.

here sophie is checking out the fish in one of the little pools at the gardens

here’s a photo from the garden.

and here’s one of the view from atop the cathedral looking back into dc.

not pictured and unavailable for comment on his pantsying by john mccain and a coalition of compromise-seeking senators was bill frist who we saw inside the cathedral.

later, we looked at houses that i could never afford, played some tennis (you can ask jeff who won – though it was some of the ugliest tennis ever played, highlighted for me, by me hitting a ball in the air from 3 feet behind the baseline b/c i was unable to get out of the way of it. i did mention we were hung over right?) went to the pool and then fixed dinner. i fixed my beer and ceasar (also known as “date”) chicken and we called it an early night. btw, forgot to mention, that the night before, when i tried to give emily a drunk call, she not only answered, but was wide awake and had just gotten home. btw, when you have a secret you don’t want to tell someone, you should never answer the phone at 4am if you just got home.

anyway, the next day jeff and i headed out to the eastern market and then the nats game.

here’s an elm dresser from the far east

not pictured is the rug salesman who was importing rugs from afghanistan. also not pictured or heard is the shrill war cry and butt-kicking i almost received when i stopped myself just short of suggesting that rugs were a better export than opium.

eastern market was in kind of a bad area, though. there were a couple of toughies from a motorcycle (or motorized cycle) gang hanging around outside. you could tell those guys had putten a boot up someones ass once or twice in their octogenarian lifetimes.

on to the game (and the end of this interminable blog). burnett was facing patterson and burnett was lighting up the gun as high as 98. the girl behind us got this picture for me. it only took her 8 tries. luckily she got it that time, b/c it was burnett’s last pitch.

guest umpire for the day was leslie neilson.

“hey, look, it’s enrico polazzo!!!” only 25% of all visitors will get that. on a related note, my mom saw the queen of england last week and i told her that it’s impolite to reach across her to get your hot dog, you should just let her pass it down. obviously, that held no meaning for her, but i enjoyed getting to say it.

back to the weekend….here patterson throws a pitch to miggy cabrera.

that pitch did not hit miggy in the head and make him unable to hit a baseball for three weeks. that would be an odd thing to need to clarify were it not for this pitch. which did hit miggy in the head and make him unable to hit a baseball for three weeks. i thought it would have been sorta humorous if i had captured the pitch that knocked jeff’s player out for the year on film, but alas, he appears to be back at full strength again.

oh, yeah, also of interest is the fact that at the friday night game, one of the guys in our group had a foul ball actually bounce off his hands. i will not name him here b/c he displayed such sadness at the game, that i knew he was (quite appropriately) being much harder on himself than we could ever be on him. also, livan threw 150 pitches in that game and then left immediately to go have his arm sewn back on.

ok, here is jeff showing on my phone that his brother was going to lose that weeks fantasy league game according to our youaremyfantasy.com site as shown on my phone.

unfortunately it’s not at all legible. if it were at all legible you’d be able to see that todd is losing….”here’s the mormon tabernacle, here’s the dog that tried to bite me”….even more unfortunate is the fact that the dark sith pulled out another come from behind victory.

speaking of come from behind victories….what? a three run game winning homer for the nats? i NEVER saw that coming. score one more for bud selig.

we then sped away to the airport making it by the narrowest of margins to get me on my way. this is what the white house looks like at 35mph

it was a great weekend, and i was pleased to see that jeff’s family was real and not imagined. ’til next time.