A few weeks ago we started tossing around ideas for office summer activities. My idea was to get tickets to a game at the minor league field in Sacramento, since even though not a one of us in the office cares even remotely about baseball, it would still be fun. So earlier in the month I drove over to the box office to get tickets for the office (I could have purchased them online but my brain ran screaming in shock when I discovered that this would require me to pay a $4 surcharge per ticket!!), and the tickets have been sitting safely in the petty cash box in the office ever since.

Thursday night was the game. We all changed after work and then piled into cars and headed for Old Sacramento since the ballpark is within walking distance and we wanted to get dinner first. It had all seemed like so much fun when we were planning it. Dinner first, followed by a short and leisurely stroll around Old Town, and then we'd head over to the park for the game.

Except that Thursday it was 106 outside, and there was absolutely no wind, and since the ballpark is located rather inconveniently outside and not somewhere air conditioned, it wasn't nearly as much fun as we'd hoped.

Our seats were, at least, not in the direct sunlight. But that didn't make it any better. We found our seats and then sat in them along with everyone else around us, sweating away any remaining driblets of energy we possessed, as it just seemed to get hotter and stuffier as the minutes passed. The ballpark sells garlic fries and everywhere in the stands was an overwhelming smell of garlic and sweat and heat and exhaustion. The poor mascot (who must have been literally melting in that costume) tried to get the crowd excited but we were all too hot.

The first three in our group made their escape after the third inning. I held out until the fifth inning before I finally had had enough of sitting in the middle of hundreds of hot and sweaty people feeling more and more gross from sweating with each passing second. And from what they tell me today, everyone else in our office left by the end of the seventh inning, and by then so had a lot of the other spectators as well.