This is Butter. They’re really cute. I’ll post some better pics later in the weekend.

Sasha sniffs out my battery charger. :)

Welcome to Phoenix!

We’re on board at Philly, but delayed at the gate for a few minutes because Vice President Cheney’s plane is about to take off, and they won’t let anyone else move until it does, according to the captain.

On time. Woohoo!

Looking out the left-hand side of the plane, I had a SPECTACULAR view of Manhattan as we left, including my Washington Heights neighborhood, the whole length of Central Park, and both Midtown and Downtown. I’ll post pics when I can. Now, we are in Philly.

Getting on my tiny plane to Philadelphia (where I get on a presumably somewhat larger plane to Phoenix :)

It’s a gorgeous autumn day in Queens, where I’m on a New York Airport Service bus en route to LGA.

I don’t know what’s the matter with my body’s internal clock, but whatever it is, I blame the Red Sox. Specifically, I blame Byung Hyun-Kim. :) Anyway, for some reason I became utterly exhausted at around 8:30 PM this evening, and decided it would be a great idea to take a little nap. Some nap: I slept until around 12:30 AM — awakening to find a Seinfeld rerun on Fox, the Yankees game long over — and now I still have to pack.

Pack for what, you ask? Ah yes, I’m going to Phoenix this weekend! This is the weekend I’ve been looking forward to ever since late July: I get to see Becky (and Toby) again for the first time in two months, and I finally get to meet Becky’s new kittens, Butter and Sasha! We also will be attending the USC-Arizona State game on ASU’s campus Saturday; hopefully the Trojans will fare better than they did last week!

Anyway, as to my schedule, at least I don’t have an early-morning flight. I depart LaGuardia at 1:05 PM. Still, I need to leave Port Authority at 10:10 AM to get there two hours in advance, and that means I need to leave here at 9:20 or 9:30, to be safe. Jeez, that’s like seven hours from now … so I’d better stop blogging and start packing. :)

Can you hear that sound? Yup, that would be the collective heart of Red Sox Nation, beginning to break… again.

As stated below in my audio posts from the bar, Boston trails Oakland in the best-of-five Division Series, 2-0, after losing 5-4 in 12 innings Wednesday and 5-1 Thursday. The Sox now must win three games in a row — two at Fenway Park, then one back in Oakland — or their oh-so-promising season is over (to say nothing, probably, of Grady Little’s tenure as manager).

Wednesday’s game was one for the ages. It also lasted for ages: 4 hours, 37 minutes, to be exact. Considering that it started at 10:00 PM Eastern time, it was obviously VERY late by the time the game finally ended. My friend and co-worker Scott, who doesn’t have ESPN at home and thus had to watch the game at a sports bar, was out until about 3:00 AM in Williamsburg with dozens of other exhausted (and, in the end, heartbroken) Red Sox fans, all sticking it out till the bitter end. They actually had to switch bars during the late innings; the first bar basically begged them all to leave, so they found another bar nearby that was still showing the game.

As for me, I was at home, but I actually missed the end of the game. Lying in bed watching on TV, I started nodding off in the eighth inning (by which point it was already past 12:30 AM), so I don’t remember much of the eighth or ninth, though I think I was awake for some of the action. I definitely woke up when there were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, only to see Oakland tie it up. At that point, I concluded that the A’s were going to win (I always think the home team has a huge advantage in extra-inning games, especially when they have the momentum), so I essentially stopped making any sort of concerted effort to stay awake. I left the TV on, and I convinced myself that perhaps the announcers’ voices would wake me up if anything major happened. But that was not going to happen, of course; I didn’t wake up until sometime after 5:00 AM, whereupon I found the TV still on but airing something else entirely. I groggily grabbed my cell phone, checked my e-mail (which automatically receives the final score of all Sox games), saw that Boston had lost, and then went right back to sleep.