I'm pretty sure that tonight's game matching #10 Texas against #5 Georgia was the last game I'm going to see in Sanford Stadium as a season ticket holder.

To ensure we made it this time (after the traffic fiasco that prevented us from seeing Mississippi last month), Mom and I left the house four-and-a-half hours early. For many years, we parked at Clarke Central High School, where parking fees helped fund extracurricular activities, but as the University has driven tailgating farther and farther from expensive campus lots, the high school now fills up extra early. So we parked at the dentist office across the street instead. Mom wanted to walk the old route through the student center into the stadium, which ultimately only served as a reminder that the University has built new barriers to block it. Oh well. We had plenty of time, and were still in our seats 90 minutes before kickoff, even after I was misled by some context clues (temporary stadium seats that looked like the old seat backs replaced earlier this year) and mistakenly accused someone else of being in our seats. Poor Mom. She's usually in bed by 9, but we didn't get home again until after 2AM. (Don't worry about Audrey: the dogsitter got her fed and to bed on time.)

As it happens, the guy I wrongly asked to move has been attending UGA games for decades, even after moving from Covington, GA, to Florida, but he said after a few decades, he canceled his season tickets and now instead spends that money and more buying tickets on the secondary market just for the games he wants to attend (in Athens and in other locations for other teams). It's a sound plan, one I've been contemplating a lot recently in this modern era of pay-for-play college football. Once upon a time, the university told me my donations bought books and meals. Now, my money finances base salaries, freeing big-donor money to outbid other colleges for the best kickers in the transfer portal. Somehow, I don't find that as satisfying.

Which is not to say that I don't think the players should be paid. Since they are the product, they should get the lion's share of whatever the football program takes in. But it's also fair for me to judge whether I think I'm getting my value's worth from my season tickets. Given that I only made it to two games this year (UGA closes its home schedule next week against 1-9 Charlotte at 12:45 PM, and I am definitely not going), I think the math is pretty clear.

As it happens, when I wasn't stuck in my own head thinking about the future, I did notice there was also a football game played in Athens. It was okay, but it certainly did not live up to the hype. (Though I'm probably spoiled by the two spectacular wins UGA put on Texas last season.) Georgia was pretty obviously the better team for most of this game, even if their offensive coordinator was calling predictable plays that made Texas's defensive line look amazing for about half the game. But the imprecision of the Longhorn's youthful quarterback (some kid named Arch Manning) ultimately doomed them. You'll read in the tabloids about fourth down conversions and an onside kick that blew the game open late, but Georgia had 14 points by halftime, more than enough to win what would become a 35-10 blowout. Good Dogs.

I hope that some other team will be nice and give Georgia a chance to play in the SEC title game. If that happens, I'll happily watch that game with my dogs beside me on the couch.

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Happy Halloween from Henry, Louis, and Audrey (and her mom)!

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Three innings and thirty minutes into the third game of the current World Series between the Blue Jays and Dodgers, I said to Mom, "This one looks like it's going to be a quick one." She sensibly went to bed at the top of the eighth. I held on all the way to the end... all eighteen innings and six hours and thirty-nine minutes of it. At least when I'm wrong, I'm *really* wrong.

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In the 23 years I've had season tickets, today's football game was a truly unique experience. And I don't mean because #5 Ole Miss scored touchdowns on their first five possessions and #9 Georgia only won because they scored on every possession until they knelt on the ball to run out the clock at the end of a 43-35 game. (What happened to defense?!?) No, I mean it was unique because we didn't make it to the stadium to watch it.

We tried. Mom and I left the house on schedule (rare for us) at 11:30 with the intention of making it to Athens two hours before the 3:30 kickoff. After almost 40 minutes of travel, on I-285 just past the exit for I-75, traffic stopped. Despite Google continuing to insist that we'd be out of the traffic jam in just "15 minutes," the next 4 miles took 2 hours. Eventually we learned that the source of the trouble was that somehow a box truck had overturned on a straight road and blocked three of four lanes of traffic not more than a half mile before the next exit, Jonesboro Road.

By the time we were finally past the accident, I calculated that even if everything went perfectly for the rest of the route to Athens, there was no way we could arrive, park, and make out way to our seats in Sanford Stadium until very near the end of the first quarter. So we made the decision to cut our losses and turn the car around and watch the whole game at home on TV instead. Somehow, it took almost 40 minutes to get home.

I was disappointed. Mom was disappointed. We were looking forward to the big game environment, where someone hatched a hairbrained plan to "stripe" the stadium in black, white, and red, requiring me to wear white instead of my typical red to a home game for the first time. That's probably why there was an accident. I didn't wear red and it broke the universe. Sorry, universe. (And if you saw the game on TV, you may have noticed the white end zones, but deciding to put the black stripe on the sunny side of an afternoon game? Are you trying to kill those people? Good on them for refusing the assignment.)

Sure, you can't always get what you want, but if you try, you might get what you need, so we made the best of a bad situation with some soft pretzels, Mexican Coke, and Culver's custard (Mom's idea for cushioning the blow) as we watched the Dawgs scratch out a win from our sofa with poodles and a havanese. That's my kind of unique.

(I took a picture of us in in our "Stripe the Stadium" whites in front of the TV showing Sanford Stadium pregame, but Mom looks better in this one in our back yard, so it's the one you get.)

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When my aunt told me I had to wear a mask to a masquerade ball she was throwing on Saturday, there was really only one option.

Beware, evildoers!

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How did I spend my 9/11? By celebrating the invasion. The British Invasion.

When it was announced that Herman's Hermits were coming to town, Mom bought tickets. (She thinks lead singer Peter Noone is cute.) She needed a companion, and I was recruited. She said I'd be the youngest person in the room. She was right with the possible exception of Mr. Noone himself, who clearly really, really enjoys performing to a live audience. He was charming, funny, and a talented impressionist in addition to sounding pretty much the same as he did sixty years ago.

Now, I did a little research. I was familiar with many of Herman's Hermits' hits, and I knew that the backing band for Noone in Newnan consisted of none of the other original Hermits (some of whom still perform as such in Europe). So this was really Peter Noone and "a band that they call Herman's Hermits for promotional reasons." But that doesn't really matter as much as it might for some other long-running acts because almost all of the original Hermits' songs were themselves covers of previous recordings. (Not so uncommon for many acts of the era. Even the Beatles started with covers.) You go to a Peter Noone show to hear Peter sing songs that you associate with Peter Noone, and that's exactly what we got.

For future reference, this was the set list. The asterisks identify songs first recorded by Herman's Hermits.

• I'm Into Something Good
• What a Wonderful World
• Love Potion No. 9
• Ring of Fire (impersonating Johnny Cash)
• Dandy
• A Must to Avoid*
• Leaning on the Lamp Post
• Daydream Believer
• Sea Cruise
• Listen People*
• Barbara Ann (chorus only, as "New, New-nan")
• Bennie and the Jets (chorus only, impersonating Elton John)
• Start Me Up (intro only, impersonating Mick Jagger)
• Just a Little Bit Better
• Silhouettes
• The End of the World
• Jezebel
• Can't You Hear My Heartbeat*
• Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter (false start first line as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
• I'm Henry the VIII, I Am
• There's a Kind of Hush

As I said, I did a little research. You'll notice that the final song is There's a Kind of Hush (which was performed tonight with a synthesized horn section). As it happens, that's the same song that Noone sang to close their act exactly 55 years ago, September 11, 1970, (with real horns) when Herman's Hermits played for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. If it was good enough for the Queen Mum, it's good enough for my Mom.

Full disclosure: One Herman's Hermits song I was not familiar with was A Must to Avoid, and my malfunctioning ears thought I heard Peter singing "A Muscular Boy." Which probably means the crowd wasn't that much older than me.

The Ed Sullivan Show, June 6, 1965

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Earlier this week, my father asked to borrow my copy of Scrabble. Technically, he didn't ask to borrow my copy; he asked to borrow his copy which he claimed that I kept when he abandoned it during one of his moves. If I did such a thing, I would think that would make it my copy now, but none of that is really the point.

As it turns out, I had four copies of Scrabble in our games closet, two copyright dated 1953, one 1989, and one 1999. I assume these once belonged to my mother, my father, and my long lost brother. That accounts for the '53 and '99 boards. Is the '89 board mine? I don't recall ever owning my own Scrabble board. Am I a chronic Scrabble kleptomaniac?

More importantly, while investigating the contents of the four sets, I discovered that all have the correct number of 100 tiles, all except for the oldest. It has 100 tiles, but not the correct 100. It is missing one O₁ and one X₈. In their place it has instead two tiles that must have come from yet another old set (one N₁ and one Z₁₀) that have been crossed through with pencil and O₁ and X₈ penciled on the other side. It sure looks like my handwriting, but that can't be right, can it? (An amnesiac Scrabble graphomaniac?)

Now my problem is that my broken brain is bothered by the fact that I own one incomplete Scrabble set. I have a terrible compulsion to go online and buy one vintage O₁ and one vintage X₈. That would be stupid. I have three perfect good Scrabble sets, and even the bad one is playable. No one in my house has even opened a Scrabble box in at least a decade. (No offense to Scrabble. It's a great game. But most of our board games were played by me and my brother, and as I said: "long lost.") If only I could stop thinking about it. I've become a psychoneurotic Scrabble monomaniac!

Some kids have monsters under their beds keeping them awake at night. I now have two tiny wooden tiles in my gaming closet. Damn Dad and his desire to play word games.

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Dad, reading my t-shirt: "I don't get it."

I tried to explain.

Dad, confused: "They made a whole band of dogs?"

Honestly, I'm still not sure if he was just fucking with me.

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Immediately after I say I'm running to the store to buy milk, Mom asks, "What are you going to bring back for dinner tonight?"

"I've made dinner for the past two weeks," I say. "So the question should be what do *you* want to make us for dinner?"

Mom didn't even pause before replying, "I guess we're going out to eat tonight."

By which, it has now been revealed, she meant that I was to order take-out. So now, in addition to my trip to the grocery store, I'm also making a detour to the local barbecue joint.

Me and my big mouth.

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A quick catch-up with my family:

In order to take over the accounting for our rental property, I needed to get the password to our accounting software from my mother. She pulled out a pen and wrote a twenty-five character string on a pink square Post-It. When I commented that it was a little long for a passphrase, she corrected that she hadn't given me the password itself but the mnemonic she uses to remember the password. She proceeded to explain to me what each element represented. However, when I tried to type in the password later, it was denied. Turns out that Mom had mis-remembered her own mnemonic.

My nearly octogenarian father, who suffers from arthritis and COPD so badly that he cannot easily walk to his own mailbox and back, has decided that he wants to take a trip to a beach so that he can watch girls in bikinis. But he won't go back to Panama City, where he used to live, because "they're all assholes," and he won't go to the closest beach, Tybee Island, because "it doesn't have an amusement park." So instead he's planning a trip to Nashville, TN, because "they've got plenty of bars."

My mother's sister's sister-in-law lives behind us, and my aunt frequently visits her to use her swimming pool. Which means my aunt frequently visits our house and uses it as her personal pool house. When I came home from the store the other day, I walked in from the garage to find her standing naked in my kitchen, she screamed, "I thought you would knock first!"

Not so long ago, partially in memory of my father's mother who always said "you have to write letters to get letters," I hand wrote a letter to my father's sister, who lives in Alabama. She eventually replied with an SMS text message and explained that she was much too busy to sit still long enough to write reply letters. But she strongly encouraged me to drive the four hours to her house for a visit when I had the time.

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