My grandmother was admitted to the hospital after she fell. That's not cool. She's stabilized, but is in the Surgical ICU. Going to see her yesterday was the most complicated ordeal ever to happen, possibly excepting the Marshall Plan. I can already hear the questions within your minds. "Why?" you ask. Some of you. The others ask "What's the URL to that thing with the kittens?" or "I wonder what's on television tonight?". But let's pretend you're asking why.
- When you're shocked about something and trying to get somewhere, it tends to become somewhat hard to manage detail. Case in point: My grandmother is in UPMC Presbyterian hospital. UPMC has 18 different hospitals, but the only ones I ever really go to are UPMC Presbyterian, UPMC St. Margaret and UPMC Passavant. Herein lies the problem. I confuse UPMC Passavant (near North Park, adjacent to LaRoche College) with UPMC Presbyterian (in Oakland, adjacent to University of Pittsburgh). Which adds on about 1.5 hours of driving.
- We get to UPMC Presbyterian and go to the information desk, where the person manning the desk is currently focusing on talking to her friend on the phone. When she gets off and helps the people in front of us, we ask for directions to where my Grandmother is. She proceeds to give us...not really directions, but more a list of things that it would be nice if they existed. Like signs instructing family members to where on earth they should go. Or a nurse's desk that it's required that one visits to make sure they're in the right place. Or some indication that the button to open the door is located across the hall, next to another door.
Anyway, enough with that. We got there, we visited, she's stable, so we decided to move on after being shooed out of the ICU by nurses that were changing shifts.
Earlier in the day, we'd gotten tickets by way of Jenna's dad who got them by way of some relatives I've never met to the Pirates game. Jenna and I though "Hey!", and decided to go after visiting the hospital. So we go. It's about half an hour into the game, but we decide "Hey, free tickets" and continue. We park in the garage on Stanwix and trot over to the game, now in the fourth inning, scoreless. The tickets are evidently luxury box, which is nice, I think, because I've never been in one of the suites at PNC before. We're admitted to that fenced off area that the PNC Park employees guard so that those of us who get the $5 student seats don't bother the elite.
So, once again, I've never been in the suites or club level. I shall start with the club level, as it is where we were directed. The club level, it seems contains about a hundred or so people that don't give a damn whether or not they're at a baseball game. It isn't necessary that this is at the park. The game plays on televisions while everyone there sits at the bar, or eats at the dining tables, or plays pool. Were I someone's boss who's shelling out money so that my employees can enjoy themselves at the park, I'd set up some rouse, shuttle them to a sports bar, and have that be the end of it, because that's all it is.
Having discovered this, we went down to our box. I've had hotel rooms that were less nicely decorated than this. You can actually see the game (!), but there are only ten seats outside, so that four of us were always inside, watching the game through the glass. I cannot overestimate the usefulness of a private bathroom at PNC. I cannot understand the usefulness of the couch. All questions were dismissed, however, when our party, at about the bottom of the seventh, was joined by Dave Littlefield.
...
Seriously. We've got weird little headshots with his signature to prove it. He was pretty nice (ignoring for a second that he was there in his capacity as a PR man) and joked about needing help with decisions for the upcoming trade deadline. He mentioned needing an "outfielder and maybe a third and first baseman." I somehow restrained myself from taking this opportunity from pinning him to the wall and making it clear with no obstruction my feelings on Slaw-o, because I was pretty sure that'd make things weird. He left, the game continued, and we watched Kip Wells return to being a reasonable pitcher, finishing a complete game with a strikeout, his twelfth of the game.
We sauntered back to our car, which was somewhere in the garage. I say it that way because though we both remembered parking on Gelb (all floors are color coordinated, with the color listed in English, French, German and Spanish, and with the language listed in English under the color. I bring this up because presumably if you're reading "jaune" and recognizing that as the color of the elevators around you, you probably already know that it's in French, and wouldn't be helped anyway by the declaration of the fact in a language that isn't French. I can only assume that the reasoning involves teaching children colors, but that would require you to visit more than one level and that doesn't make sense either. Now, if you'll recall where I was, "...though we remembered parking on Gelb) our car was nowhere to be found. I can't explain what happened. It took us about 15 minutes of searching rojo, grau, verde and braun to discover our car now where we left it on amarillo.
We left.
We returned home.
We considered calling Rory about the Dave Littlefield thing.
We didn't. Sorry, Rory.
We slept.
3 comments:
I left out that I roughed Littlefield up in the parking lot until he gave me $7 for gas and parking.
Did you tell him about my baseball blog? And forget calling me to tell me about it, you should have called me while it was happening and then be like, "Hey Dave, my friend wants to talk to you."
For real though, next time you consider anything that involves me, just do it.
Post a Comment