At week's end, our hometown State College Spikes, a Pittsburgh Pirates short-season Single A baseball affiliate, had a strong hold on the title of "Worst Team in All of Professional Baseball." With a record of 10-40, they are so bad that Dick Farrand, a resident at Centre County's assisted living community, who is a contagiously positive sports enthusiast, turned down an opportunity to go see his beloved Spikes play with his fellow community-members because, "They stink." 
In an effort to boost fan attendance, the Spikes offered a "Bring your Dog to the Game" Night on August 6. Neither Kathi nor Chad are dog-lovers (a better term for us would be "Dog-gedly Anti-Pooch"), but some of our friends have canines and so we joined them at the park.
To our amazement, the Spikes were "Lucky Dogs" that night, pulling off a flea-infested come from behind victory. They scored four runs shortly after the "Seventh Inning Scratch" to win 4-2. While Chad spent the evening brainstorming bad dog puns to share with other fans after the game, Kathi sat downwind from a shedding golden retriever and right in front of an excited and long-tailed mutt. She spent half-innings inhaling dog hair and getting slapped in the head by the mutt's tail. Chad told her to just not to make any "bones" about it - it wasn't that "ruff."
After being pronounced man and wife, the bride and groom exited the chapel to NBC's "The Office" theme song and the entire wedding party rode on a purple-painted school bus to the reception overlooking barbed-wire fences and guards with shotguns (okay, now we're exaggerating). All four hundred guests had a great time since there were no fun-haters allowed.
At 11am, we decided to head out and hit the tennis ball around. We love playing tennis together. Since our wedding day, we have enjoyed playing tennis together more than any other sport. Our tennis dates started as Chad teaching Kathi how to play the game but have now progressed to competitive best-two-out-of-three-set matches. Kathi has really become a good player (or Chad is just an exceptional coach - you decide).
One would think that these brushes with greatness heavily favor Kathi during our matches, but they don't. Although Chad always loses focus when (somewhat) well-known players and coaches walk by, Kathi always gets self-conscious too, because they are usually gawking at her (even the women's basketball players).
This morning was no exception. At the gas station on our way to the courts, we saw Big Phil Taylor. Phil tips the scales at 6'3" and a beefy 330 pounds, and spent a great deal of last football season as a starting defensive tackle. However, Phil has made more headlines recently as the subject of what JoePa has termed "the media's witchhunt" of Penn State's football program. Last week Taylor was kicked off the team for repeated off the field incidents in which he violated public law (mostly fighting). 
Once we arrived at the well-maintained courts overlooking Mount Nittany, we changed from seeing great people to emulating great people. With the looks of Kournikova, Kathi had spurts where she played like Sharapova and others where she acted like McEnroe (Chad had to dock her one point for slamming her racquet down in disgust, she then slammed her racquet down again, using explicit language to tell Chad what she thought of his point-penalty). Apparently not everyone is happy all the time in Happy Valley, but it was a "great" morning nonetheless.
