June Break is Over

Image via WikipediaI hope that everybody had a great 4th of July weekend.  All things considered it was a pretty good 4th for our family.  It was the last day of my son's slightly more than two week break between the end of the school year and the start of his summer session.  His next break will not be for another seven weeks when he will get another two week break.

What better way to spend the 4th of July with two quintessential American activities, a baseball game followed up with a fireworks show after the game.  It has become a family tradition of ours to go to the Bowie Baysox minor league park on July 4th.  The Baysox always have an excellent fireworks show, and it is even better on Independence Day.

Usually, this time of year, we run into the threat of severe thunderstorms or overly oppressive heat and humidity.  While it was a fairly warm day yesterday with a bit of humidity, there was enough cloud cover that it was not unbearably so.  In fact, it even got to be somewhat pleasant sitting in the stadium.  We did get a few sprinkles here and there, but no real rain.  We were pretty lucky, because I looked at the radar maps a couple times on my cell phone and it looked like rain was all around us.  There were some heavy storms about 30 miles south of where we were.

As I said, the Baysox always put on a great fireworks show.  Little did we realize that they would be providing a bunch of fireworks of a different kind during the game.  It may have been the highest scoring Baysox game that we have ever been to.  Fortunately, the home team ended up on the winning side of the scoreboard against the Reading Phillies.

At first, it didn't look like it was going to be a positive night for the Baysox.  They fell behind early in the game by the score 3-0.  The Baysox scored the next 5 runs to take a 5-3 lead.  The Phillies then scored 3 more runs in the top of the 6th inning to regain the lead 6-5.  The Baysox then score 7 runs in the bottom of the 6th and 5 more in the bottom of the 7th to take a 17-6 lead into the 9th inning.  The Phillies made it interesting scoring 6 runs in the 9th to get to the final score of 17-12.

The 4th of July game is one of the few games where the Baysox nearly completely fill the stadium.  There is only one road out of the stadium, so my normally 10 minute drive home from the stadium took considerably longer last night.  Combine that with the traffic leaving the community fireworks show a couple miles from the stadium led to gridlock.  The direction we had to travel was not as bad as the opposite route, but it still took me 30-40 minutes to get home.

After the game, I was working on burning a DVD of a Rich Mullins concert for my son to take with him to school.  I have bought three different copies of this particular video, but he has broken them in the past.  It usually takes me a couple hours to complete a DVD for him on my laptop.  Unfortunately, there was an error when it was burning, and I was unable to get the DVD burned for him before he left.  When he got up this morning, he was looking through his binder of CDs and DVDs and told me "Rich Mullins is missing."

I was a little disappointed that I was unable to get his DVD made for him before he left.  My wife had decided that she wanted to try to take him back to school by himself.  She has said, and probably rightfully so, that when I stay home from work on the days he goes back to school that he resists because he knows he is going back.  With his change of classrooms, I kind of wanted to go with them today, but it was probably best that I not be around to make it easier for her to get him back to school.  They made it back with no incidents.