Asakiyume mita

We have a David Ortiz home run ball from when he was a nobody playing in the Minnesota Twins system. He was at New Britain Stadium, and we had season tickets, and the kids would run outside the park to collect balls hit over the fence. Ortiz (Papi is his nickname) signed it for us.

And once upon a time I worked at a Dunkin Donuts overnight. It was before it was bought out and nationalized, and each location still employed bakers to make the donuts. Since the midnight-6 shift was sort of quiet, I took care of the counter and did bakery tasks like donut-filling and powdering. In fact, when I interviewed for my first job at the college, the smarty-pants team member with the last question thought she was going to catch me off-guard by asking, "How do they get the filling in Twinkies?" And I said, "They inject it, if it's anything at all like doughnuts." I had her then--she started laughing out of surprise that I knew. And I told her the whole story of the hoppers of jelly and bavarian creme, and how they had big pointed tubes, and you held a doughnut in each hand and punched them onto the tubes, and actuated a lever with the backs of your hands to fill the doughnuts. You knew by the heft how much to do. And if you turn a Twinkie over and look at the bottom, you see the injection holes.

I don't think Dunkin Donuts do them that way anymore. Most DDs are satellites, and the doughnuts are made elsewhere. We used to have real eggs on location, too. I had to crack them to make the breakfast sandwiches.