Saturday, August 27, 2005

North Potomac, MD (Part I) - Baseball, Birds, & XBoxes

We had a lot of fun visiting Chris's family in Maryland. We caught up on sleep, pigged out on good food, and generally relaxed.

  • We played some 4-player baseball, where I tried my best Jason Varitek imitation at the plate (you know how he taps the instep of each foot before each pitch?), but when it came time to hit, let's just say that I made Mark Bellhorn look real, real good.
  • There's a lot of neat wildlife in the backyard, including deer and a pretty pair of cardinals. I'd never seen a real cardinal before, and up close, they're fascinatingly red. (Yeah, duh, right?) Anyways, I learned that almost all birds love black-oiled sunflower seeds, and reports indicate that they are currently getting quite fat from the feeder I set up.
  • Lastly, we spent a good deal of time playing an XBox game called Jade Empire. It's an RPG where our character, a "spirit monk," fights a lot of ghosts, deposes a couple of corrupt emperors, and rescues the Water Dragon, a goddess. It made me feel much closer to Rebecca and her research. No really, we had a great discussion about the similarities between this game and the political undercurrents in 7th- and 8th-century Chinese poetry.

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