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Sunday afternoon. I’m making PB and J sandwiches for my daughter, my wife, and myself. I turn the game on the radio for a little bit and it’s the third inning. No runs in at this point. The Twins had already won the series, so I kind of wonder if we were due to lose one. The sandwiches made, I turn off the radio and go into the living room with lunch. My wife cleans up from mowing the lawn and I’m watching a JoJo Siwa special. I’m thinking about how much I’d rather be watching the Twins play baseball. JoJo slides around the stage in her heelies. My daughter watches and plays Legos. JoJo keeps talking about how you can be whatever you want to be. If that were true, I’d be The Man Not Watching JoJo. My wife is ready to go so we get our daughter to tidy up and turn off the TV. She says she’s getting a little tired of JoJo, which brings peace to my troubled heart. I don’t hate JoJo, but I do hope for smaller doses. She’s much better than the YouTube show my daughter calls The Grown-Ups and the Kids. That show kills my soul. I check the score. 6-0, Royals. Just like I thought. We were going to win the series but lose the last game. Still a good showing. We drive to Target and arrive, with our shopping list on my wife’s phone. She returns some shoes. We go to buy a present for Evie to give the host of the first birthday party she’s ever been invited to. She’s thrilled, but mostly because she wants us to buy all of the toys for her. Fortunately, she corrects herself on that mistaken belief relatively quickly. I try to sneak a Jason Voorhees action figure into the cart for my Friday the 13th collection, but my wife shuts that down real quick. This will all come back to the Twins. I just need to set the stage. The biggest surprises of the trip to Target were the lack of shoes and softballs. I recently started playing in a very relaxed (no strikeouts, not a lot of running) softball game and I need new shoes and a softball to practice. I’m currently sporting an ovoid-shaped scrape on my right knee that looks like someone slapped a slice of Italian deli meat to my leg. I need better traction. There are very few shoes, and nary a softball. Not sure how Target can be softball-less in late May, but here we are. Nearing the end of our Target trip, we are shopping for a birthday card when I succumb to a nagging temptation to check the Twins score. I assume they already lost and, for whatever reason, the Athletic app just failed to notify me of the final score. I check my phone and see the Twins have tied the game. I show the phone to my wife. My jaw hangs open. I shove the phone further into her face. She agrees this is good news, but her eyes tell me two things. First, I need to pay attention to my family and not become obsessed with my phone, watching the updates come through pitch by pitch. Secondly, I need to get the phone out of her face and quit acting like a goober in public. Now I’m smiling and walking up the main aisle of Target. I’m nodding at other people because the Twins are winning. In fact, they are going to win. I know this in my heart, and I’m so happy I feel like everyone else is happy for me. Like we could all break into a musical number celebrating the approaching victory. We make it to the car before I check my phone again – this takes a lot of self-discipline. I sit down in the passenger seat and see it’s the bottom of the ninth. Duran is in, and Gamecast tells me those first two strikes get in there at over one hundred miles an hour. He gets an out and then the next batter fouls off a million pitches. There’s a mound visit and I worry about a potential injury to Duran. I worry, but I have to pocket my phone and unload sundries from Target. We get inside just in time to see the last out come up on GameCast. Comeback achieved. Twins sweep the Royals. I feel worn out from getting worked up over the game. I cook up some supper, get my daughter ready for bed, and relax. There are a lot of baseball games in a season. The Twins will need me to monitor the games closely, wherever I may be.

It’s been years since Joe Mauer didn’t have to work on July 4th. Now that he’s retired, the Twins legend found himself with the entire day off to enjoy America’s birthday. In a Twins Daily exclusive, the St. Paul native tells us how he celebrated.It was always fun to go to the park and watch the fireworks shows when I was a kid, or when Uncle Ken came over with his special fireworks from South Dakota and Mom would yell at him. Now that I’m home with the kids, I wanted to make sure they got to experience a real 4th of July celebration. Here’s what I found out: They have fireworks at Target now. Did you know about this? At first I thought it was a set-up, like when (former Twin Justin) Morneau told me I had to grow sideburns or Ron Gardenhire wouldn’t let me on the team plane for road trips. I didn’t know he was kidding me about that until 2016. Pretty funny deal, but I wish he’d told me sooner. I don’t even like sideburns, but I sure as heck didn’t want to drive to Tampa all the time. Anyway, I go to Target, and there’s this big shelf of fireworks right out in the open by the birthday cards. I look around, and I don’t see any hidden cameras or police officers. I pick up a couple roman candles and take them to the register. I even asked the clerk if it was ok for me to buy these, because Mom would get pretty steamed if I was on the news for breaking the law. The clerk looked at me kinda funny, but said sure. And I walked out of Target with a bag of fireworks. It was a pretty neat deal. I took out my flip phone and sent a text to (former Twin Glen) Perkins and asked him if he knew that you could get fireworks in Minnesota now. He said yeah, they changed the law a couple years ago, but the good s-word was still in Wisconsin. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to Hudson to buy some bottle rockets and then get held up in fireworks customs at the border. Unless Morneau was kidding about that too. I should probably check on that. Have a great weekend, Twins fans. Click here to view the article