Blackout and Baseball

Blackout Night once again coincided with something that required an exception. Our Rays have gone to the World Series, so we watched the game by candlelight. Well, um, my husband did anyway. He likes that kind of stuff. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once I wrested my children's Nintendos away from them and we turned out the lights, we supped on delightful spinach, artichoke, ham and provolone cheese (except for me) wraps and kettle-cooked potato chips. Those are my favorites.
We played a round of Clue Jr. - a game that Emma got for her birthday. Take note if you have 8-to-12-year-old kids, it was loads of fun! The mystery is a missing piece of cake (instead of a murder, of course) and you have to find out who ate it, at what time, and what they had to drink with it.
It turns out that I ate it with chocolate milk at one o'clock.
News to me.
But there were snickering accusations thrown around the coffee table in the darkness. "Do you need a napkin to wipe up those crumbs, Colonel Mustard?" "You ate the icing first, didn't you Mrs. White?" And Emma felt like such a real detective, peeking under the "pieces of furniture" to find clues.
We took a brisk walk (that's two times in one week!) in the cool-ish night and returned to candlelight showers and book lights for reading and bed times for kiddos.
Then it was time for the ballgame. As I was saying, I'm really not into sports. Not at all. I mean, once in a while, when I was younger, I hollered during a football game to impress a boy. I even rooted for the Atlanta Braves for a season because I was going steady with a boy who was a fan. I bought a t-shirt and everything. I'm such a poser.
What's a girl to do? I was trying to stay as true as possible to Blackout Night, so I didn't want to turn on enough light to knit (oh my - people are certainly going to receive half-knitted items for Christmas) and I didn't want to pull out my laptop and zone out. But I did notice that those baseball boys spit an awful lot during their closeups. By the end of the second inning, I was amazed enough at how much spitting was going on that I decided to count. I suspected, though, that as the game went on, mouths would dry up a bit and that was pretty much true. So, here's the rundown. In the third inning, I don't know who scored or anything, but I know there were 11 televised spits, and mostly it was BJ Upton. I don't even know what team he's on.
But I was right - things started to dry up. In the fourth inning, I only counted 8 spits. By then, I had started to nod off in the dark and boring land of candlelight baseball. So I made Chris keep count. I stirred at some point and he informed me that there'd been a comeback - 10 televised spits in the fifth inning. I was encouraged. Bolstered, even.
But the rest of the game was to disappoint. I got the final count as I shuffled off to bed. Five spits in the sixth, eight spits in the seventh and only six in the eighth inning and we ended things off with eight spits in the ninth inning. I had hoped for a little more action, but we take what we can get.
Falling asleep with a baseball game on, though, can do funny things to your head. I often wake up with strange songs in my head, and assume they are related to whatever I was dreaming. But this morning, I had (and still have) Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" stuck in my head. This made no sense, though it's an absolutely brilliant piece of music.
Then I had a hazy recollection of the back of a pitcher's jersey. I asked Chris and, sure enough, there's a Rays pitcher named Scott Kazmir.
Ah. That must be it.
I am certainly an odd duck. But it makes things fun.