friends

To quote my friend Dan's favorite song, "friends are friends forever" (that's actually all I know - sorry Dan Kalbach)

Buddha's coming to town. Big week in the Murphy household. He comes into town every blue moon (not really sure what that means...but I think it means every once in a while...). Annie gets excited. I get excited. Griff gets excited. Coop, frankly, is largely disinterested. He doesn't know Buddha that well.

We had some friends in town last week and felt like we gave them the 30 cent tour. I'm sure there's a thirty dollar tour of Cincinnati, but we aren't really qualified to give it.

So the question is always raised, "what the heck should we do now that we're here in Cincinnati?"

"Um....bowling? Movie? Beans? (or cornhole...I still feel a little uncomfortable calling it that)

There's this subtle pressure that I always feel to be the Mr. Roark of Cincinnati every time someone visits. I love just hanging out and playing cards...but you want to have a story. So, this is my plan:

Hang out at my house and play cards - BUT, tell everyone this story:

We were going downtown to meet up with some friends from college at Sudsy Malones. We were going to see this band, The Diago's, who are touring with Clapton this summer - but our car broke down on MLK. We started hitchhiking when a bus actually picked us up. Turns out it was the University of Chicago's baseball team. These guys were awesome, but they were kind of frustrated that three of their guys had the flu. They'd driven all this way and were going to have to forfeit to UC.

Then one of them (I think it was K Dub) said, "Hey, why don't you guys suit up?" He talked us into wearing the uni's so that they're team would have enough players. Buddha would play left field and I'd play first. We suited up - played the entire game...and Buddha hit a ground rule double off a guy that's a projected first round draft pick.

These guys were so excited that we won that they talked us into road tripping it out to their game against Temple. Pretty soon we became their good luck charms. These guys were sending us tickets to fly around the Mid-West just to play for their team. After the UCLA game there was a rumor that they were cracking down on team lineups and the coach (the Big Cat, we called him) told us that our playing careers were over.
The fun thing is that the Marlins are now looking at Buddha as a non-roster invitee to next year's spring training.

I figure that now we can relax, hang out, and just have fun. No pressure on doing something awesome on a trip out to Ohio.