COMMUNICATIONS INTERRUPT: FREEBIES COST REM

Not a damn thing to do with the band. Just sayin'.

Ol’ Windsweeper has been busy killing letters and using Microsoft Word to do it, and I’m frankly sick of opening Firefox to see a Photoblog, so…what the hell.

Went to see another Milwaukee Brewers game on 26 July. Not even a week earlier, Caterpillar Global Mining bought 5000 Terrace Reserved tickets apiece to that game and the following, both against the Chicago Cubs, as a goodwill gesture, thank you, blah blah blah of some stripe…guess they entered into some sort of corporate partnership with the Brewers. What kind of partnership a baseball franchise and a mining company needs, I’ve no clue, but it happened. They were made available on the Friday before, at 0900…which naturally means I’m already at work. Figured it was worth a shot nevertheless. A single two-dollar charge for printing ‘em yourself, when normally each ticket, being for marquee games, would be $20 before the convenience and delivery fees? Yes, please.

Was kind of pain to get through the order—the site was being hammered like MattyCollector.com on a sale day. MLB does better with the refreshing waiting room concept, though. Took so long to make it through, though, that I couldn’t get seats together for either game. However, Windsweeper has, in the past, made clear that sitting together isn’t a high priority for her when attending Brewers games—a mild insult of which she was rather unaware until I spoke up—so I jumped on what I could get for us, and picked up another pair for the next day’s game for a coworker who is a diehard Cubs fan (somehow, we get along fine), and put the order on through.

Game day comes, Windsweeper’s off and I’ve left work an hour early to get down to Milwaukee at a reasonable time…which almost never works, anyway. Traffic gets pretty slow down there around an hour before first pitch, and that day was little different...probably worse, what with the Cubs as opponents. Plenty of Chicagoans make the drive north to fill seats with that narfy bright blue. As it was, it took half an age to get parked in one of the General Parking lots (Uecker, I think). No way I was getting into Preferred, let along paying for it on gameday. Not for a Cubs game.

By the time we’d walked to the stadium and gotten past the gate, the first inning was already over—a fact made more irritating because all the scoring in the game happened in that inning. Made our way up to my section and saw that all but two in my row were empty, so Windsweeper stayed. Could always have moved if the actual seatholders showed up. They never did, so we were able to enjoy the game together. Well, she enjoyed—me, I’ve never been all that big a fan of pitching duels unless there turns out to be a good shot at a no-hitter (then the enjoyment becomes retroactive). Windsweeper left after the fourth inning to get her usual cheese-fries-in-a-helmet—cupboard’s getting full of those things (exaggeration), but I still have the ice cream helmets and drink cups that I picked up after Brewers games in the late 80s/early 90s, so I’m one to talk, I guess.

Game ended with a win and we headed back to the car. The drive back home was uneventful and as always, somehow longer than the drive away.

Windsweeper stayed awake until 0200, keyed up from a win yet again.

+++PRIME OUT+++I MISS REGULAR EIGHT-HOUR SLEEP+++