whaaa happened?

i've been flying low lately, as in way under the radar. mostly due to feeling either meh, blah, or rawr, but i'm trying hard to work my way out of it.

i have been sad for the past 2 days because i went to the Giants game with my mom, dad, and Gouda on saturday. well, yeah, the Giants make me sad a lot, but what made me upset was that i forgot my camera and forgot to ask the usher (or anyone else) to take a picture of the 4 of us with Justin's camera. on the drive home, i realized it's probably the last game that all four of us will go to together. fortunately, everyone is doing fine health-wise, but we left early because the whole day was just too much for my dad and he was getting really tired.

so, i've been kicking myself for the past 2 days. we have gone to so many games together over the years, back to the Candlestick days when there were fewer than 10,000 people at the game. yet, there was my dad, taking time off from preparing lectures or grading exams to drive me 2 hours each way. often it was the whole family, but sometimes it was just me and my dad. we'd freeze during the entire game but he never complained. i just had to be there when the gates opened, otherwise it seemed to me that i wasn't a loyal fan. he didn't complain. i never wanted to leave early even if it was an awful game, again with the loyalty thing. he didn't complain. i recently came across a stack of ticket stubs from the Giants games we'd been to from 1987 through the early 2000s. it was over 1.5 inches thick. i thought of all those miles and all that time my parents invested in driving their maniacal fan of a daughter up to the games, never complaining. i gave them hugs and thanked them again, but they both responded by saying that they enjoyed going, there was no reason to thank them.

i'm at the point now, 48 hours later, that i can sit and think about saturday's game and not completely crumble. i am glad that we went as a family and got to spend the day together. after dinner in town here, they drove back down to Monterey. i got the phone call that they had arrived at home, safe and sound, and could relax. i hope my dad was able to enjoy being at the ballpark. i know it wasn't an easy day for him but he was a trooper through the whole thing and, as always, he didn't complain once.