Monday Monday 9.29.2008 Part I

Monday Monday Part I

Hi Everyone,

I know that it seems like forever since I last reached out to you via this email communiqué, but believe me it hasn’t been due to a lack of subject matter (this particular week especially). The past month since Maggie and I got engaged has been about home improvement projects, family, friends, baseball, and at least a couple of days where we just hung out together.

As you can tell from my subject line, I plan to make this week’s Monday Monday a multipart series because I really do have a lot to cover. In other words, if I don’t cover the portion of the story that includes your contribution to my life over the past month – don’t get offended because a later email might be completely devoted to you.

Maggie and I had some vacation to burn this year and we decided to explore some of our own native land here in the United States. Since the heated election between John McCain and Barrack Obama has garnered my interest in a way never before done by the political world, it seemed fitting that we would choose to focus our vacation around two battleground states: Ohio and Pennsylvania. In reality, politics had absolutely no bearing on our vacation decision but it did make for a nice fluff paragraph for Part I of this week’s Monday Monday.

If you’ve been on the Monday Monday list for any period of time, you might know that Maggie Mae and I are trying to attend every Major League Baseball Park in the country. Our trip really centered on attempting to make a dent in that list, and our two chosen states provided the force for making that dent. We knocked out four baseball stadiums: Progressive Field in Cleveland, PNC Park in Pittsburgh, Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.

We began our trip in Cleveland visiting with our college friend, Brian Stakes, who entertained us with homemade brews, nature walks, the Great American Brewery, beer tasting, and the Winking Lizard (Pizza and Wing Bar = Awesome) among other things. As you can probably imagine, Maggie and I went way over on calories during this visit. In the interest of space and your time, I won’t go into extreme detail about each of these attractions, but I will say that we thoroughly enjoyed each and every aspect of our visit.

On the morning of our Cleveland Ballgame, we met our roommate and a couple of our Clarkson professors at Leah Murphy’s (another Clarkson friend) house to say goodbye to her before she leaves for two years of study in Germany. We had a delicious breakfast served up by her family, and we enjoyed their stories about what it was like growing up as Germans in America. We followed up our all too brief visit with Leah and her family with a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and our official trip to the Great Lakes Brewery.

After all this, it was time for the main event of the Cleveland Portion: The Cleveland Indians and The Detroit Tigers battling it out for absolutely no chance at a post season spot. Coming off a heated fight in the previous evening’s confrontation, expectations were high for our game. In the end, I don’t really have anything to report except that the Hot Dogs ranked somewhere in the bottom 50th percentile and that we did meet up with our roommate and professors again to watch the game. I guess one of the more memorable aspects of the evening had to be the inconsistently but sometimes rabid Cleveland crowd. If they hated you (Gary Sheffield), they made no bones about letting you know. Following the game, we experienced the Cleveland version of the Hard Rock Café with Scott, Mike, and Sandy (our roommate and professors).

In Part II of this week’s Monday Monday series, we will explore PNC Park, The Great American Ballpark, and Citizens Bank Park.