"No, I'm not! I'm condiments! I've been promoted!" - Murdock, The A-Team

 

Sweet, sweet beer kegs. They’re off at an NFL® stadium where I went on a tour – turns out that there is plumbing that’s turned on every Sunday that only carries sweet, sweet (cold!) beer to the taps throughout the stadium. I took the picture to see how to fix up my future house. Mmmm. Beer.

I suppose it started as The Mrs. was reading “The Hobbit™” to The Boy that we realized The Boy is dangerous. The Mrs. related The Boy’s assessment of Gollum©’s personality, “It’s like the nice part of him is gone, and might never come back.”

Since that’s a major subplot that Tolkien spends 14,342 pages developing as hobbits and dwarves walk, sing, and complain at each other in “The Lord of the Rings©” series, looks like old J.R.R. (who has three initials?) could have skipped writing the next three books if a seven-year-old can see that one coming.

Anyhow, lat on Friday night (say, midnight) we decided we’d go see the NFL preseason game on Saturday. Since the only choice for purchasing tickets for all of us online seemed to be oriented around $190 tickets, I passed on that. I figured we could get some the next day, since it was preseason.

We paid for a parking decal to the nice lot, parked, and walked to the box office. After I had taken The Boy and Pugsley through security, I went to the ticket booth to order five tickets. The ticket lady behind the glass was getting through telling a truculent drunk man that, “no, I won’t buy your ticket back,” when I got there. I ordered the five tickets. The Mrs. and Alia S. then showed up, waving two tickets.

“Where’d you get those?”

“We were going through security when a guy came up to us. He pointed at you and asked if we were together, then handed us two tickets.”

Huh? Well, thank you, guy.

I then panicked. I had just ordered five tickets. Now, using higher math, I realized I only needed two.

“Umm, could I only get two tickets?”

The nice lady told me that it would be more paperwork for her, but since I had done this before I got drunk and started being truculent, that it would be okay.

This left us with a mathematically-based problem. We could split into a group of three and a group of two. Alia S. and The Mrs. could sit together, but that would leave me in charge of The Boy and Pugsley. No. Too much work.

The Mrs. and I could sit together, but that would leave Alia S. in charge of the hooligans. Scary, for her, I mean. We could leave the hooligans together, but that would be dangerous because it’s preseason. Given that it was preseason, the hooligans might break out onto the field and get a contract with an NFL© team.

We picked the better of the two sets of seats. There were two empties next to the two we had tickets for. We sat down. Thirty seconds later, two people showed up. I tried to explain that I wasn’t quite ready for my three year old to be starting quarterback for the Texans®, but that seemed to fall on deaf ears.

The second set of tickets were located somewhere in southern Oklahoma, at an altitude of about 13,322 feet in elevation. We made our way there, losing only one Sherpa in the process.
The game was good, for preseason. Heck, it’s football. The Mrs. wanted me to drive, so I saved tons of money on the beer I didn’t drink.

My personal highlight? When The Boy indicated he wanted a hotdog, I took him down to the snack bar. I ordered it, and he motioned the cashier close.

“I don’t want any condiments on my hotdog, please.”