Monday Mug Shot

Busy, busy, busy... Just the way I like my Mondays! Oh, it’s not a job offer Monday or anything, but lots of little nice things Monday. I’ll blog about some of those things later tonight or tomorrow. Today is a kinda creepy Mug Shot!

Philadelphia. Pennsylvania

The 2008 World Series will be the Philadelphia Phillies vs The Tampa Bay Devil Rays. YAWN um, excuse me, sorry about that. Yawning at the announcement of the pinnacle series of your favorite sport is seldom polite, is it now? It’s just with a marketing and television sports background, it’s hard to do anything but feel sorry for FOX Sports. Going into the post season, the Red Sox and Cubs were what the advertisers wanted to see! Then in the LCS tier, just bring on the Red Sox and Dodgers, so many stories! The Red Sox back-to-back possibility , the Red Sox-Manny Ramirez controversy, Joe Torre back in the Series the year after the Yankees gave him the snub when they were home all October. There were just so many vignettes waiting to be produced for that World Series! Even if it couldn’t be both, either team would add so much to entice advertisers with for top dollar. But the Dodgers aren’t in the World Series. The Red Sox aren't in it either. It’s the no skeletons in the current closet Phillies and the Devil Rays that didn’t even have fans until half way through the season.

:::crickets chirping::::

FBR this week will be about my decision of for whom I’m rooting, but if you read this post and know baseball a little, I bet ya already know! ;)


But on to the mug shot story!

My mug rack covers a substantial portion of one of our breakfast nook walls, so I can only look at the ones on the top. I can’t drink out of them, because I can’t reach them! Dad placed the top rows of mugs when he put the racks up for me and when I want a mug from up there down, I need help. Today’s mug was David’s assistance for choosing it, as well as getting a few Mondays worth mugs down to photograph.

One of the first Mug Shots I ever did was The Old Bookbinder’s Restaurant in Philadelphia. Now, I’ve only been to Philly once, so the mug brings up memories about the same trip. David picked this mug today because of baseball. But the rest of the story from that trip is SO October in another creepy, Halloweenish way!

Mom, Tracy, Heather H and I left from Detroit on Spirit Airlines, a value airline that flew into Philly. As I recall, our flight was delayed about an hour leaving Detroit because of fog in Philadelphia. Starbucks wasn’t open yet when we originally got there, but the delay gave us an opportunity to have a latte before takeoff. That delay was almost half the length of our flight! We joked about the plane being a small plane and there were a couple hits of turbulence on the flight. I know I joked about hoping it wasn’t going to drop us out of the sky, but we landed safely and were on our way around Philadelphia.

We’d visited the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and had lunch before we checked into the hotel. When we got to our room we wanted to see what the weather was scheduled to be like for the game. It had started to rain and we hoped we wouldn’t get rained out! After all, the history was a bonus - it was a baseball trip, a rain check would NOT be a cool souvenir when we were all there to see a new park! (It turned out that there was a couple hours rain delay, so we REALLY got to see the park! Then the home team lost 11-3!)

When we turned on the hotel room TV, we didn’t see quite what we were prepared for. That morning when we’d left Detroit, was May 11, 1996. When we had checked into the hotel early, just after 3 PM, all of the network channels and many of the cable channels, including CNN, were reporting a plane crash. It was the day Valujet flight 592 crashed just after takeoff from Miami headed for Atlanta, killing all 110 people on board. The flight is about the same amount of time as Detroit to Philadelphia and that flight too, a discount airline, took off about an hour after scheduled due to weather conditions in it’s destination.

We all stood in front of the TV, a bit shocked, a bit nervous. Had we really just been on a similar plane and joking about turbulence and the plane nose-diving? It was a little bit chilling, a creepy sensation, like there were two so similar flights and fate flipped a coin. The odd parallel, the same length of flight, the same delay, a discount airline - But that flight was going to Atlanta. We landed safely in Philadelphia - to see the Phillies... and the Atlanta Braves.