It's Never Easy

Ben and I "won" one-half of a set of four tickets to a Notre Dame men's basketball game at a silent auction last month. The game took place last Wednesday night, and promised to be quite an exciting game given that both Notre Dame and their opponent, Louisville, were nationally ranked within the top 20 teams. At the time of the game, Notre Dame was ranked #8 and Louisville #16. (ND has since moved up a spot, hooray.)

Justin and Erin held the other two tickets, and due to babysitter and other timing issues, we decided just to meet them at the game rather than ride together.

The remainder of the night was a comedy of errors. I told Ben that hey, at least it will make a good blog post.

That's our catch-phrase anymore.

Oh, Sophie just jammed four full rolls of toilet paper into the toilet? Ha ha, that will make for a good blog post.

You mean the mail carrier isn't delivering our mail anymore because the path it took half an hour to snowblow to the mailbox isn't good enough? We'll laugh about that years later as we reminisce about it in the blog.

Hee hee, you practically knocked yourself senseless and probably had a concussion? Sounds like a funny story for the blog!

At any rate, here's the condensed version.

We lined up a babysitting strategy that included someone picking Travis up from taekwondo class and bringing him back home. Meaning, one babysitter at home, and another (my mom) running pick-up duty.

Babysitter cancelled at the last minute. Back to square one.

Backup babysitter (again, my mom) graciously agreed to fill in, handling both portions of the job (babysitting and Travis pick-up). But, because of the treacherous nature of our steeply sloped driveway, and because now mom's job included loading up two young children to go pick up the third, we agreed to move my car to the street and park mom's car in the garage.

As our plan included us dropping Travis off at taekwondo on our way in to the game, I was loading Travis into the truck and also hollered to Ben to go grab the tickets from the mail center in the house. In addition, I handed Ben the garage door opener from my car so he could put it in mom's van.

As Ben is going back and forth from the house to the garage, the dog escapes.

Ben traipses through 2 feet of snow in the neighbor's yard. His knee has been bothering him from his newly defined snowboarding pastime, so it's kind of slow going. Plus the dog, by now, knows full well that this process of dog-retrieval does NOT include, upon completion, vast amounts of loving and/or dog treats. Couple that with the fact that his absolute #1 favorite thing to do is romp with the Parker's dogs in their backyard means that this endeavor is not terribly simple or at all fast-paced. Regardless, Ben finally retrieved the dog. Unfortunately, he also lost the garage door opener in the process.

We decided the garage door opener is just not a priority at this point. We leave without locating it.

On our way to drop Travis off for taekwond0, we realize we do not have the tickets. Yes, I'm serious.

Travis ends up getting dropped off for class a little late. We have no choice but to head back to the house to find the tickets. I'm convinced that, because the garage door opener was also misplaced, they were probably together. Ben surmises that he might have set them down in the snow in the neighbor's yard as he was picking up the dog. Not good.

We get home and search for the tickets (and garage door opener) for ten minutes. We find the tickets in, of all places, the mail center. Meaning they had never been grabbed in the first place. Garage door opener still lost, perhaps in the snow somewhere. For once, thank goodness for Ben's distractedness. Tickets in the mail center = much better than tickets buried in the snow in someone else's yard.

We leave the house again. We miss the green turn arrow at a particularly bad stoplight, so Ben opts for a "short cut".

Naturally, as per our luck of the evening, the short cut leads to dead end. Two cars have parked on either side of the side street we were using to connect back to the main street. The massive amounts of snow piled at the curb of said street, coupled with the poor parking ability of these idiots, meant we could not squeeze the truck in the gap between them. We honked nastily, which I'm assuming made those horrible car owners feel justifiably shamed, but because our indignant honking did not lead to drivers scrambling from the nearby houses to rectify the situation, we had to turn back around, losing valuable minutes in the process.

We arrived at the arena one minute before tip-off. Well, I mean, we made it to the street just outside the arena. Bad news, we were stuck in a ridiculously long line of cars traveling roughly one millimeter per minute into the parking lot. I'm assuming all these other drivers also had lost pet and forgotten ticket disasters, otherwise they are just a bunch of procrastinating jokers.

Half an hour later, we finally got parked, and raced into the arena. I mean raced quite literally, because the weather was frigid and we were parked approximately three hundred miles from the arena entrance.

Exciting game ensued. Notre Dame won handily in overtime. We enjoyed ourselves and got free t-shirts. No complaints.

After the game, we ran back out to the truck, only to wait another half hour to leave the parking lot. We were so low on fuel that we actually turned the truck off between our spurts of movement.

We did make it home without running out of gas.

The garage door opener is still lost, though.