MONDO EXTRAS

We flip over to the action in Pensacola, where Rob and Mike meet up with the Boston buddies to get started on the house. Work begins, as it must, with a beer. There's no menial task that can't be improved by an infusion of alcohol, after all, and besides, it greatly increases the possibilities of a hilarious nail-gun incident. As Rob explains it, once he gets the guys inside, they all suddenly have powerful thoughts about decorating and what colors to paint rooms and so forth. It's easy, of course, for them to say this when it's not their house. "Purple in the bathroom!" and so forth. Ultimately, they stop stalling and pile into a couple of vehicles to head for the hardware store before it closes. In the car, Rob admits to one of the guys that he's afraid everything they do, Amber will just want to do over. Don't worry, Rob, it's the creepily 1950s-era thought that counts! The guys head into the hardware store and start shopping, pausing to make goofy faces with the safety goggles and perform other critical functions. Rob pauses to look for something "beachy" to paint the family room, and for the bedroom, he'd like a "beige-ish reddish brown." He interviews that because the crew he brought is not composed of "Michelangelos or anything," the whole idea of having them paint the house made him a little nervous. Finally, the sales guy is ready to wrap up, and he says by way of confirmation, "We're going to do Firefly in the bedroom." Rob looks down at the yellow paint chip. "Can we call it something else?" he says uncomfortably. "Kick-Ass Yellow?" one of the guys suggests. So it is agreed that what the hardware store knows as Firefly will now be known as Kick-Ass Yellow. Heh.

Fort Myers. Amber isn't having great luck right out of the gate in her position outside the entrance to the spring training game, and she's beginning to fret that they won't get the job done. They spot David Ortiz, and they yell out to him, but...he doesn't stop. You know, he used to be a Twin. Maybe he's not fully thawed yet. By Ortiz and others, Amber is turned down, and turned down again.

After a commercial, we see Amber going down in flames again, but finally, she gets hold of Tim Wakefield, who signs the painting for her. She starts to get a little momentum and says that some of them were actually kind of jazzed to do it when they found out whom it was for. Trot Nixon, in particular, seems rather enthused about Rob. (For those of you who are not baseball people, that's a real guy. His name is both "Trot" and "Nixon." It's a rough life.) Of course, this is unlikely to make you think better of Rob so much as less of Trot Nixon. If that's possible. And there's Bronson Arroyo, and Jason Varitek, and -- of course -- Johnny Damon, who was probably told by Red Sox PR to get his hairy hide out there before Amber had to go home without his autograph. As Amber and Nicole take off with their prize strapped to the car, Amber says that she had fun doing the autograph thing, but now she's running horribly behind schedule again, because it was so time-consuming.