Sunday, January 16, 2011
Well, after not nearly long enough in Lawrence, we're now officially on the road back to what passes for civilization (Texas).My dad made a point to let me know that it's 71 degrees back in Florida today (he lives vicariously through weather.com); it was 22 degrees when we were walking around downtown, so I really didn't appreciate his update. Ah well, soon enough. Here's what went on yesterday:
Saturday, January 15, 2011
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| Not sure I'm down with the white stuff. |
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| Is it sad that every time I saw, "Lecompton" I wanted to sing an Eazy-E song? |
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| This gave us real reason to celebrate in the car. Woot! |
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| Happiness everywhere |
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| Our street! Well, kind of. |
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| Bee-yoo-tee-ful campus |
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| Loved all the hills! |
We got into town almost an hour and a half before we had planned, making our total (car) commute just more than 7 hours. I'm not sure why neither of us were tired at all after sleeping for four hours the night before (and me, three hours the night before that), but we got showered/dressed/changed and set off for Allen Fieldhouse.
Author's Note: It's COLD AS HELL here. No really: Game-time temps couldn't have been much above zero, and there was a breeze that froze my soul. Because of this, I gladly forked over the $20 so we could park right across the street from the arena. I may be a lot of things, but a popsicle in training is not one of them.
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| Allen Fieldhouse, home of The Phog |
We walked right up to the court and snapped pics as Kansas was warming up, it was pretty neat. My sister had found tickets online that were just off the corner of the court and about 20 rows off the court, so we were in a GREAT spot to see the action. We also were, as discovered just after tip-off, sitting directly in front of Tyrel Reed's grandparents, who were very, very cute and very, very into the game.
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| Marcus' fake locker on the concourse |
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| Pre-game warmups |
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| Us! From our seats. |
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| Gettin' close now, and we're pretty excited! |
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| The Twins |
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| Love the court |
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| The Phog is full! Let's get 'em, Hawks! |
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| Marcus' 1000th point |
Barbara's favorite player can't shoot for beans, so every time he set up she'd groan and I'd laugh. The man to my left made some sort of, “God, he's awful,' comment which I only too gladly passed along to her and because she has a big mouth like I do, she spent the rest of the game screaming and being angry in the man's general direction. It definitely added a little extra to the game.
We couldn't have asked for a better game: Kansas was down to Nebraska by 10 at one point in the second half, and at a threat to lose their 68-game home court win streak. Because the Spartans were playing at the same time (and losing, for most of the game, to Northwestern), I spent most of my time watching ESPN on my phone and cheering at inappropriate times toward East Lansing, Mich. Once State had sealed the OT win, I was free to enjoy Kansas once again. (I only mention this because many of you have called me a traitor, and I just want you to know that I'd never let Marcus come between me and my love for Michigan State. :) )
Kansas ended up winning by 3 with a dramatic finish that included Barbara's player (Brady Morningstar), the shrimpy white boy, coming up with the sickest shot rejection I've ever seen. We were both bummed it didn't make SportsCenter because it was crazy. Marcus scored his 1,000th point on his last free throw of the game, so I was happy I got to be there for that, too. The Phog is a crazy, crazy place to enjoy a basketball game and I'm glad to be able to say I got to see a game there. The atmosphere is so loud and charged it's hard to hear anything. It's a lot different than the Bres, and their student section is nothing compared to the Izzone, but still was a lot of fun.
Several people commented on how cool our T-shirts were (thanks, Dawn!), too, which made me feel that Kansas folks are pretty OK.
After the game, my sister wanted to try to get a picture taken with her player, so we set off to the other side of the court to wait outside the locker room with about 200 other people in hopes he'd come out. Let me preface the next encounter by sharing with you a brief history of Barbara and basketball players she decides to love:
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| Drew, her first hoopin' honey |
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| Brady, aka "The New Guy"... P.S. - How much does he look like Doug Funnie (see below?) |
She's had a crush on Drew Neitzel ever since his freshman year at MSU (2004ish?). Because she's a sports nut and reads all the message boards and stories on-line, she knows EVERYTHING about him, right down to what his favorite midnight snack is or about that time he peed his pants in 3rd grade when the teacher dressed up as a werewolf for Halloween. Seriously. So she finally got to the Bres for an autograph session or whatever, waited an hour and a half, then tripped on the corner of the court and nearly fell on her face walking up to him. She recovered – sort of – enough to have what she calls the following “conversation” with him:
(She has a poster in one hand and a camera in the other)
HIM: Do you want me to sign this?
HER: Yes. (he signs)
HIM: (pauses) Do you want a picture?
HER: Yes. (picture)
IZZO: Are you OK?
HER: Yes.
HIM: (pauses) You look like you need a hug.
HER: Yes.
Knowing her history with athletes, I wanted to be right beside her as she melted down in front of Brady so I could record every detail and make fun of her for the rest of her life for it. I'm pretty upset that she mostly disappointed me. While we were waiting, the walk-ons filed past and signed her program, and she was getting really sassy. I ask her to pick a different word than “yes” to say repeatedly this time around because when I tell the Drew/Brady stories to people in the future I'd like to have a little variety. “How about 'good?'” I asked. She then shot back a whole list of things she planned to say to him, including but not limited to, “You need a haircut,” and “Do you need me to teach you how to shoot?”
Of course, when she saw him, it didn't go down that way at all. Still, she managed to say seven different words (“Will you take a picture with me?”) without hyperventilating or tripping on the floor again, so in that respect she definitely held her own.
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| I stood with her in line for a while but then my knee hurt, so I offered words of encouragement from the floor after that. |
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| ... which is there I met Danny Manning! |
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| The love of her life, Brady Morningstar. |
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| My sis and Tyrel Reed |
We left there and headed back to the hotel to change for dinner, and ended up at Bdub's to watch the Michigan-Indiana game (have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE it when the Wolverweenies lose by a lot?)
Afterward, we set off on our own mini bar crawl. Because one half of the sibling duo is a ginormous Kansas fan (I'm a Marcus fan and just happy to be here), she had a list of bars/pubs/places she wanted to grab a drink at, and we set off. I really, really wish I'd had a pen and paper with me to record the ridiculousness that ensued, but perhaps some things were better left unmentioned.
Some scraps from the evening:
**We visited the 23rd Street Brewery (home of high ceilings and the $10 vodka/Red Bull), The Casbah (weird menu items like hot dogs with carrot sauce), and ended up at Yacht Club which, although we didn't know it until we left, was about 50 feet from our hotel. Good accidental planning.
** I noticed “Fear the Phog” pint glasses on the shelf at 23rd Street Brewery that were pretty neat. I pointed them out, and then we wondered aloud for the next 10 minutes or so why Mario Little's number was on every glass, since he's not a team star or anything. Little's number? 23. The bar's name? Yeah... not so smart this time around.
** Barbara decided we needed to commemorate our crawl with a photo taken at every place we stopped at, except her idea of “photo” was to snipe me while I was doing something else, like counting change for a tip, explaining a big word, or taking a drink. This resulted in these pictures:
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| 23rd Street Brewery... great, giant drinks. :) |
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| Casbah? |
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| This is my "ENOUGH!" face... and she knows it. HAHA |
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| Not paying attention... snipe #1 |
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| #2 |
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| Finally, I caught her mid-snipe. |
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| Ummm... no answer |
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| Yacht Club, watching SportsCenter |
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| Caught her again! |
** The night also included an impromptu mid-crawl trip to Wal-Mart, although I'm not sure why. While there, this stuff happened:
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| I am Iron (wo)Man! At first, she was embarrassed... but it wasn't long before she joined in! (see below) |
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| Sooooooo should've bought these hats! |
** When got back to the room, it was below zero outside and above 100 in the room. Apparently, one of us had turned the register to “very hot” and “high” before we left so we were treated to a free sauna for a while. When I woke up in the morning, there was frost on my pillow. Why? Her answer to the heat situation the night before was to just turn off everything and go to bed, and when she woke up, it was “too cold to turn the heat on.” As I've said before, logic is not my dear sister's strongest subject.
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| Impromptu dance party! |
On Sunday, we got up and stopped at Papa Keno's for lunch on Massachusetts St. They advertise “Slices as big as your head,” and they weren't kidding:
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| She's pouting because her calzone took forever to cook and then came out burned. HAHA. |
Afterward we stopped into a few gift shops and then headed to the cemetery where James Naismith, Kansas' first basketball coach, is buried. There's a monument at the front of the park that we've both been to but when Barbara was here last time she couldn't find his actual grave so the point was for me to show it to her... except the snow was covering all the headstones so we didn't have much success there.
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| Pretty excited about the stuffed Jawhawk at the bookstore. :) |
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| I see this and I think, "Did I really just travel 1,700 miles to escape The Rat (Mickey Mouse), only to have him show up on a wall in downtown Lawrence?" ... Faulty, for sure. |
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| Cold, but still stylin'. |
Gassed up, hit the highway, and now we'll commence with the ever-popular on-road running blog, although neither of us has slept much this weekend so I don't know how funny we'll be:
2:06 p.m. – (We've been on the highway for about 5 miles so far, just 450 to go!)
ME: Are we there yet?
HER: No.
ME: Are we close?
HER: No.
ME: How much longer?
HER: Forever.
ME: Do we need gas yet?
HER: NO.
ME: I have to pee.
HER: You're going in the trunk.
2:28 p.m. – (I still haven't driven a single mile of this trip) You know, I can drive whenever you want me to. “Yeah, but you can't type and drive. I don't want to miss you writing down any dumb moments.”
2:32 p.m. – She demands I play “Motownphilly” for the 50th time this road trip. This is, she explained to me yesterday, because Marcus and his brother Markieff are from Philly, and it came on right before we walked into Phog for their game, so this song is a good omen. I didn't bother telling her that she's stupid, because... well, she already knows.
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| These be the Twins. (Marcus is on the left) |
ME: Isn't Marcus mine? Why are you thinking up theme songs for him?
HER: Well...
ME: Stick with your white boy. Get a theme song for his hometown.
HER: THEY DON'T WRITE SONGS ABOUT LAWRENCE FUCKING KANSAS.
ME: Fair 'nuff.
3:03 p.m. – This one's going to need a little bit of background: My sister, although a texting ninja, is a complete failure when it comes to her lifelong battle with the autocorrect function on her phone. This has led to such tweets as “Wonnnnn!” instead of “Winnnnn!”, “duck you” (I'll let you guess that one) and various other text gems. She's also prone to not editing prior to a send: One day in the midst of a texting war, she said something about screaming “outlouf,” and setting me on “fiew,” which I've been able to drop in many conversations since. My favorite though, is when she told me it was cold in Texas and that I should bring “a few goodies,” which is what I've demanded we call hoodies ever since.
You can only imagine, then, the way I lost my mind when the Ciara song, “My Goodies” came on the radio. The hood went up, the sunglasses went on and the in-car dance party began:
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| "My hoodies, my hoodies..." |
ME: (Typing.)
HER: That's C-I-A-R-A.
ME: (glares)
HER: Well I DON'T KNOW! You might have tried to spell it like Sierra Mist!
3:11 p.m. –
HER: That's why you can't drive. You keep dancing.
ME: I can dance and drive! I do it all the time! You can't drive, period!
HER: 3:11...
3:19 p.m. – “I just wanna use your love toniiiight...” comes on the radio.
ME (singing): “Dawnie's on a vacation far away....”
HER (turns up radio): Shhhhh!
ME: :(
3:32 p.m. –
HER: LOOK! Horsies!
ME: Ummm.... those are cows.
HER: (quick pause) That's what I said! Look at the cows!
Me: ….............
3:45 p.m. – It's been quiet for a while. She's listening to Mariah Carey, and I want to break her Zune. So I decided to break the silence with a screechy Mariah imitation.
HER: GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!
ME: :( (she's gotten really mean in the last 3 minutes or so and all I see are “horsies” and barren land with snow on it, so I'm going to try to keep my mouth shut, at least until we get to civilization, just in case she actually does kick me out of the car.)
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| Told ya she was mean to me. :( |
6:11 p.m. – (Forgive the lack of funnies; I've been sleeping). We're hungry and need gas, so we filled up and decided to stop at Johnny's Rib Shack, the (self-labeled, I'm guessing) “Best Barbecue in Oklahoma.” The inside has wooden picnic tables and it smells like the inside of a smoker, which are all good indications that the food is good. I was set to see if the pulled pork and okra could even hold a candle to the stuff from Kansas City and watch the Pats-Jets game on the big screen. We were the only people in there other than the family that runs the restaurant and their cook. All was well and both my belly and my spirits were getting filled up watching Tom Brady choke and die, when “Johnny” came out and changed the channel. Right in front of us. It led to this exchange.
HER: Did he really just...
ME: Yeah, I think he did.
HER: What is he changing it to?
ME: I have no idea. Is there some other game on?
HER,ME: (sit in shocked silence as he settles in to watch “America's Funniest Home Videos.”)
ME: Did that just happen?
HER: No real man does that!
We suffered through a clip of a guy biting it on a bicycle and another of an old man catching fire as he lit off fireworks when Johnny's wife came out. Seconds later she hollered back to the kitchen, “Hey! Come out here! They're showin' clips from Oklahoma on the funnies!”
Only in Oklahoma.
The best part of our dinner was during a commercial just before the cook came out, pulled TV rank and switched it back to the game. It was one of those insurance commercials that the guy from Oz plays in. In this one, he's pretending to be a navigation system that “hasn't been updated in a while,” so he yells, “Recalculating! …. Turn right, now!” and causes an accident. Barbara and I laugh because it's funny, and Johnny's wife turns to us and yells across the restaurant:
WIFE: Did he just say, 'ejaculating?'
ME: (choking on my pork) I'm sorry?
WIFE: (louder) EJACULATING! DID HE JUST SAY, 'EJACULATING?'
ME: No, no, no (laughing). “Recalculating.”
WIFE: (just as loudly) Oh. I thought he said “ejaculating.”
BARBARA: I hope no one orders any cream pie while we're here.
And again: Only in Oklahoma.
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| Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny's! |
6:44 p.m. – We're back in the car and attempting to get back on the highway after a short photo session in front of a giant pig on the sign. I'm a little worried now, because I'm starting to think my sister's dumb is contagious:
ME: We're not going south. We don't need to go south. We need to go north. Hey! Hey! Wait! WHY ARE YOU GOING SOUTH?
HER: Because we're in Oklahoma, fucker! We're going to Texas.
ME: (visualizing a map in my head) Oh. Right.
HER: 6:44....
7:00 p.m. – Boy, someone's getting a little punchy...
HER: (yelling, for no reason) DEUCES!
ME: Who are you flipping deuces to?
HER: Deuces! … You know if you put up two deuces, that's 2-2, and that's Mook's number?
ME: …..
HER: (giggles)
7:14 p.m. –
HER: Why isn't (your iPod) just playing random songs?
ME: Because you don't like 90 percent of what I have, so I'm trying to find things you do!
HER: I didn't complain about anything! … Except for that fucking dancing coat song!
(she apparently harbors an intense dislike for Donny Osmond)
8:04 p.m. --A sign on a billboard read, "Elvis shops at...(insert generic general store name here)." I read it aloud, which led to this exchange:
HER: Elvis lives in Nashville, idiot.
ME: Two things. Elvis is dead, and he lived in MEMPHIS.
HER: Whatever, it's the same thing as Nashville.
(My apologies to all my Memphisian friends, I couldn't resist the jab. ;) )
8:21 p.m. – She's also really, really upset by all the Spanish music on my iPod. She told me if I play any more, I have to walk so I'm trying to watch it. Except she tricked herself once...
(song comes on, it's 'On Bended Knee, by Boyz II Men)
HER: I LOVE this song!
ME: Promise?
HER: Yup.
ME: Good, 'cause this is the Spanish version.
HER: FUCKKKKKK!
8:43 p.m. – We've been in the car for seven hours now, and I'm pretty certain we've been going in the wrong direction the entire time. … About 3 hours ago we passed a sign for Lexington, and just now we went by Gainesville. Well, at least one of us is getting home tonight.
8:44 p.m. –
ME: You're not going to like this song.
HER: Why not?
ME: It's from my church band.
HER: Your church has a band?
ME: Hell yeah it does!
HER: Well, it is Sunday... PRAISE THE LORD!
8:52 p.m. – We're back in Texas after all, woot. Pretty glad we didn't end up in Gainesville, even though it's only 30-some degrees here.
9:05 p.m. –
HER (reading over my shoulder): Barbara did what?
ME: Stop reading over my shoulder!! You CAN'T read and drive! You can't even DRIVE and drive!
HER: 9:05....
9:17 p.m. – The Temptations' “Aint Too Proud to Beg,” comes on, and apparently Barbara feels the need to honk the horn before every new verse.
HER: Honk! Honk! Honk-honk!
ME: (laughs)
HER: Honk honk! Like an ostrich!
ME: Huh?
HER: You know, the sound an ostrich makes. "Honk! Honk!" Like if you ask a little kid what sound an ostrich makes, they say, "Honk, honk!"
Now, I really had no comeback for that one, but I'm thinking back through my childhood and I don't think anyone ever really messed with my head and asked me what sound an ostrich makes, because I've long since graduated from kindergarten and I still have no idea. Moving along...
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| This lil' guy looks about as confused as I was. |
9:24 p.m. – Last song on the iPod before we're home.
HER: What song is this?
ME: I'm not telling.
HER: (listens for a second) Is this Spanish “Motownphilly?”
ME: (laughs hysterically)
HER: YOU FUCKING BITCH!
9:31 p.m. – Road trip completed! High-five. Tomorrow, the final leg of my journey back to the land where things are boring, but at least it's warm.
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If you actually made it through that entire ramble, congratulations! I shall now reward you with a video of me singing "Yakko's Nations of the World" in the car at 5 a.m. (yes, I'm pretty sure I picked my nose halfway through the song. Sue me.)
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