If extra innings are free baseball, then last night we got an entirely free extra game when the Giants defeated the Nats after 18 innings of low-scoring play.

Historic? Exhausting? Thrilling? Boring? Annoying? Intriguing? Frustrating? Tiring? Inspiring? Suspenseful? Confusing?

Yes- and every other emotion a human can experience in six hours and 18 minutes, especially given you can run through all the emotions four times each in that amount of time.

It can argued that spending six hours in front of a TV on a beautiful fall night is a waste of time.  Consequently, one can also see it as an opportunity bonanza given how much time can stack up between innings in a double marathon situation.

SO- here are the things I was able to accomplish between each inning.

Between first and second, washed dishes

2/3   Dried dishes

3/4   Walked dog

4/5   Planted jalapeño peppers in my indoor garden

5/6   Thought about helping the less fortunate

6/7   Put up dried dishes

7/8   Did several loads of laundry.  Bought car insurance in less than 30 minutes.

8/9   Prayed to Baseball Gods, tried to talk guests into not leaving because something was about to happen

9/10  Built Pablo Sandoval statue out of childhood play-doh stash, worried he was going to chew his fingers off if the game went much longer

10/11 Put statue in place of old Barry Bonds statue

11/12  Looked up stats on longest games in MLB playoff history and thought: oh, that’s interesting

13/14  Watered jalapeños in the indoor garden, adjusted sun lamp

14/15  Put together fancy snack assortment tray and shared with imaginary guests since real guests left an hour ago

15/16  Bought 2015 calendar online just in case the game lasts for rest of year

16/17  Relived first 15 innings, counted on fingers the number of Nationals ejected from game.  Imaginarily erased Bryce Harper face paint.

17/18  Harvested my jalapeños and made salsa, added to fancy snack tray assortment

When my wife awoke, she was thrilled by the four loads of laundry completed, the clean kitchen, the zingy salsa, and the exhausted dogs in her house. The snack tray assortment, she commented, seemed to be trying to hard. She inches, slowly, every so slowly, to loving baseball for all the wrong reasons-

but who’s counting?