Still breathing

Either I didn't hear the alarm go off this morning or my wife was ever so kind as to shut it off before it rang at the ungodly hour of 6am. Well, actually, it was set to go off at 6:03 - for reasons unknown to even me, I never set the alarm directly on the appointed hour. You never know when those few extra minutes of sleep will come in handy.

I can hear the Internet saying that 6:03 really isn't that ungodly of an hour. Well, Internet, it is when you're up until 1:45 the morning before to find out if you're even going to be able to go to Fenway this postseason. Faithful readers of Vivacious will note that we had tickets to game 4 of the ALDS against the Angels, but since the Sox swept, we were denied the opportunity. Last year our benefactors were kind enough to give us game 3 ALDS tickets since we had never been, and the Sox, being down 2-0 at the time, were no guarantee to go beyond that third game. So since we didn't get to see an ALDS game, we were rewarded with game 3 ALCS ducats, ensuring our attendance last Friday.

And then the rains came.

The game was washed away, and rather than inconveniencing three ballparks' worth of fans (bumping Friday's ticketholders to Saturday, Saturday's to Sunday and Sunday's to Monday) we were suddenly relegated to the unsavory prospect of using our tickets for nothing more than kindling after Saturday's 19-8 debacle, which we watched from the safety of our undisclosed bunker somewhere in Maine. I suppose it's a good thing we were there, because I'm much less inclined to throw and/or break things in my parents house than I am in my own abode.

But last night found me stretched out on the couch, sitting in a darkened living room, well past the witching hour, while my wife tried to get some shuteye before an exhilarating two-state tour of Ohio and Nebraska (apparently, the recruiting tour of greater Kazakhstan was deemed unnecessary). But of course, it's impossible to truly escape from a Red Sox postseason game, so she had the radio on in the bedroom. After one particularly excitable call from Sox radio announcer Jerry Trupiano, she came ambling out of the bedroom, only to have a mini-rally quashed in the 10th. She then shuffled back bedward, rubbing her eyes and pouting at being summoned from her torpor yet again for such a bothersome interruption. But come the 12th, she was the one completely wide awake when Big Papi went Big Fly - again - to end it.

And now I'm Fenway-bound.