A Very Expensive Cherry Coke (or Why Charlie Had a Banner Night)

I am not exactly sure where to begin the story of tonight.

Perhaps I could start with lunch this afternoon when I picked up the styrofoam cup that had been previously full of Coke and, after taking an empty slurp, swore at Mark. He had begun with a small sip and that progressed into an absentminded consumption of every last drop.

Or maybe my tale needs to begin at some point during one of the four times that Mark's car battery has died in the past year.

Or, I could go all the way back to when we bought the damn Toyota Echo that Mark affectionately refers to as "his pregnant roller skate" due to it's snub-nosed design. This hamster-powered, tiny car that lacks basics such as power-steering was far from our first choice, but our options were severely restricted when, with both of us in school and living on student loans, his former POS died so suddenly and completely that we literally left it on the side of the road with a note inviting anyone who could drive it to keep it.

Regardless of where it begins, the story picks up at the point when we pulled the frozen pizza out and popped it in the oven for dinner tonight. Mark declared he was going to have a beer and I commented that I usually like Coke with my pizza. Still feeling bad about drinking all of mine at lunch earlier today, he decided to redeem himself by leaving right then, driving to Sonic and getting me a Cherry Coke with extra cherries. What a sweetheart!

Three minutes later my phone rang.

DING DING DING. You guessed it! Dead battery!!!!

So I pulled the pizza, all bubbly and smelling gorgeous, out of the oven, threw Charlie (who was looking longingly at the pizza) outside, and went to rescue my husband.

Unfortunately, it seems things were a little more serious than usual this time. The hypochondriac battery had finally become seriously ill, and could not be resuscitated. So it was on to Walmart to buy a new battery, and then back to Sonic so that Mark could replace the one that was now in a better place.

(On a side-note ladies, how sexy is it that my husband actually knows how to replace a car battery himself?)


So the $1.50 Coke became an eighty dollar battery and consumed the majority of our evening, but don't fret! This story has a happy ending!




When we finally got home and I was pulling the pizza out of the oven for the second time, it slipped and about two thirds of the toppings slid right off. When you are a dog....it just doesn't get better than that.

The 12th Man

Some of my earliest memories of my grandfather involve him teaching me how to climb a tree or sitting in a hard, plastic chair amongst peanut shells cheering on Texas Tech. A rotund, red-faced and bearded man, he could always be found in the stands clapping his large hands when Tech scored, and hurling epithets such as "SQUIRREL" (an insult I still do not fully grasp) at the clearly half-blind referees.

He grew up in Lubbock, TX, graduated from Lubbock High School, opened some small grocery stores and started what would become a very large and loud (read: slightly insane) family. The quintessential Patriarch, my grandfather would sit among all of our raucous conversation at family gatherings with his bourbon and enjoy being surrounded by those he loved. Among the many important life lessons that he ingrained in all of us (such as how to play blackjack and make popcorn without a microwave) he instilled a passion for his favorite team, the Texas Tech Red Raiders, as well as a deep hatred for the Longhorns and Aggies.

I lost my grandfather in September of 2007. Last week Texas Tech defeated a top-ranked team for the first time in school history, and it was the Texas Longhorns: a school that has barely deigned to acknowledge a rivalry between the two schools, much less grant that the Red Raiders could be any kind of threat.

He would have loved every second of it, and after the game last Saturday, after I managed to get my pulse back to a reasonable rate, I raised a glass and joined Texas Tech's tribute to one of their most devout fans.