The Baseball Game, three weeks ago.

I caught a typo on TV a little while ago.



As an isolated incident, green enery wouldn't have been that noteworthy, except that Kev had also recently seen a bizarre spelling error on TV.



Diseasages.

Why am I telling you this? Trust me, it relates.

A couple of weeks ago, Beeb and her band were playing The National Anthem at the Cardinals game. It was a day game, and R had taken the whole day off so all five of us could go together.

The band students were getting to leave school early and taking busses to the stadium, but the busses would not be bringing them back to school. They wouldn't be allowed to take their instruments back to their seats either, so parents would have to give their student his or her ticket before they left for school that day, then meet their students outside of Gate 1 after they were done playing, and take their instruments back to their cars. Got all that?

We had planned to shell out the major coin for a good parking place because Princeton was going to put his Percussion stuff in there, which is heavy and cumbersome, and because I'm really a kinda nice person, not a heartless bitch. Except for sometimes.

Buffy had wanted to carpool, which would have been fine, but I had offered to drive another of Beeb's friends home and we weren't going to have room in the Odyssexy. So Buffy and I had kinda talked about caravaning down. Well, really, Buffy had talked about it and I had tried to subtly convince her that it didn't really make any sense to do that.

Here's the thing with Buffy. She comes up with these elaborate plans that she thinks are going to streamline the transportation to or from some event for maximum efficiency, and it's always WAY more trouble than it's worth. And it annoys the fuck outta me, frankly. I usually end up just offering to drive because it's easier.

Anyway, the morning of the game I woke up at 6am, and when I gave Beeb her ticket I saw that the game started at 12:40 instead of 1:40. Problem - the boys didn't get out of school until 12:45, so I spent the morning in a complete panic.

We would have to pick the boys up early from school, and the boys would not have eaten lunch yet, so I tried to pull together something marginally nutritious out of what I had on hand. You saw my last trip to the grocery store, didn't you?



I also went to the Busch Stadium website to find out if we could bring a cooler and snacks, because fuck if I was going to pay for food after I was planning to drop about $25 on parking. We were allowed to pack sodas in clear plastic bottles, water, and snacks. SWEET.

I wrote the boys notes to give to their teachers so we could pick them up at 11am at school and immediately head down to the game. I had my fingers crossed that Buffy wouldn't try to call and co-ordinate some ridiculous plan that would cause more stress than it would relieve.

It was also going to be one of those weird weather days where they were predicting Scattered Showers, which, of course, might or might not be scattered over the stadium. We were going to be waaaaaay up in the Upper Deck, which is usually windy, but is also closer to the sun, so do you plan for warm or cold? You have to plan for BOTH.

Once the boys left for school, R and I went to Target to get a few of those $1.99 rain ponchos since we knew they'd charge out the butt for one at the game. We had the cooler, we had snacks, we pulled cash to pay for parking, dressed in layers, had jackets, umbrellas, ponchos - we had it all worked out to pick up the boys and get there in plenty of time.

I hadn't heard from Buffy yet. This was good. I assumed she'd figured out that she was on her own and that we'd see her there (or not... I wasn't going to go out of my way or anything).

About five minutes into the forty-minute drive to Busch Stadium, I heard a strange WHOOOOOSH!!! from the backseat.

Pie, what's goin' on?

Um... nuthin...



Riiiiiight.

Anyway, here's the best part. We'd meticulously planned for every possible eventuality, we were super-prepared (over-prepared, even), and what's the thing about the best-laid plans of mice and men?

St. Louisans can appreciate this... we were directly in front of the Old Courthouse at Broadway about to turn onto Market Street, having driven forty minutes in from West County.

For the Non-Locals, just to give you a sense of it,

Here's a closeup of downtown.




Zoom out? Downtown's the yellow patch on the Right side of the map.
Chez Karma is just about all the way over to the left edge.




And I suddenly had one of those Instant Diarrhea moments. I very quietly - without even cursing - said...

We don't have the tickets.

R sighed in disgust. Understandable.

I'm so, so sorry...

Here we were, about to pull into our rock star parking spot, and I did the one thing that could completely fuck up the day. If we had forgotten snacks, we could survive. If we'd forgotten the umbrellas and ponchos, we could get under the roof. Anything else would have been fixable. FUCK. ME.

There was no way we could afford to buy four more tickets. We could have purchased a ticket for either R or me and then the other parent could take the boys to do something else, I suppose, but we were just plain FUCKED.

Mortified by my own stupidity, I called Buffy to let her know of this unfortunate change in plans.

She had just left her house, which is about ten minutes from my house. She offered to go to my house and get the tickets off of the bulletin board in my kitchen. I cringed, knowing what my kitchen looked like. If you've ever been to my house, you may have thought I didn't clean up for you, but I did. The kitchen was filthy by MY rather lax standards, but fuck it, this was an emergency.

Here's what Buffy saw:





Welcome to the Inner Circle, Buffy. You're one of the people I no longer clean up for. It's really a compliment, believe it or not.

So Buffy went to my house, got the tickets, found us in the Rock Star Parking Lot, literally across the street from the Stadium,



(See?? Walking up to our seats, we could see our van!)




and we got in line to enter the stadium but we MISSED seeing the kids playing the National Anthem. We heard them, and they sounded great, but I felt absolutely HORRIBLE because not only did I miss seeing Beebie, I caused Buffy to miss seeing her kid too. I felt like such an asshole. We didn't even get to our seats until the top of the 3rd inning. I was so pissed at myself, it consumed me.

And then I consumed some overpriced beer, and I got over it.



It was cold. It rained.



But we had fun anyway.




And afterwards we drove Buffy and her fam back to where they parked.



Get this - they had to pay FIVE BUCKS to park there!! Believe that???

Oooh, I almost forgot how this whole story relates to the typo thing.

You know how women's restrooms at major sports venues are famously crowded? Well, not this time. I walked into a Busch Stadium restroom and saw nothing but open doors. How lovely it is to not have to wait cross-legged in some huge line, I thought.

I had my choice of stalls, so I chose one, completely at random, locked the door behind me and dropped my drawers. While hovering in the stall, mid-pee, I realized that not only was there no paper, there was also no kindly next-stall neighbor to whom I could plea for help.

For the record, I'm not above waddling from stall to stall with my jeans around my ankles, and if it hadn't been so freakin cold, I probably would have.

I briefly considered picking up the two conjoined squares I saw on the floor, mostly dry other than the footprints on them, to dab my cooter, and at that very moment, I thought...



THAT is where Diseasages come from.



(P.S. I used a Kleenex from my purse, if you're wondering.)