Milwaukee and Chicago I

Hello Friends,

On Friday, we left Minneapolis in the afternoon and headed for Milwaukee to catch the Brewers game against the Houston Astros. Very quickly, I realized I was going to like Miller Park. It definitely ended up being one of my top five or top three favorite parks. Some of the highlights were the mascot sliding down the big yellow slide every time a Brewers player hit a homerun and, of course, the famous sausage race. During the sixth inning of every game the stadium has a race between five "sausage mascots." The best part about this time was that the Italian sausage won! The game itself was exciting yet anticlimactic. The Brewers scored eight runs in the first inning and the outcome of the game was never in doubt. They ended up winning 11-2, but we didn't stick around to see the ending. We left early to drive down to Chicago for the night, and I dropped off Sam and Elle at Sam's aunt's house then drove out to my brother Mike's house in the suburbs. After three cities in one day, I was pretty exhausted so I relaxed and watched last week's episode of Entourage before calling it a night.

Saturday was spent soaking up some serious family time. My parents are in Chicago for the weekend staying with Mike and Christie, so we hung out together all day Saturday. We woke up early (relatively speaking) and went to brunch before getting ready for a cookout at Mike's house. Mike's college roommate Adam, his wife Bree, and Bree's cousin Meaghan (see St. Louis) joined us as well. We all started drinking and catching up, then eventually we played some cornhole and ate dinner. Another old roommate of Mike's, Grove, came later and we ended up getting a pretty good crowd to go to the bar near Mike's house.

Since Grove tends to enjoy liquor, the bars were interesting. He was buying us shots and drinks all night, and here are some of the results...
Adam tapped the top of Mike's beer bottle with his bottle, expecting Mike's beer to foam up and overflow. The only problem was that Adam was drunk and hit it too hard, resulting in the bottom of Mike's bottle dropping out and beer and glass going everywhere.
Grove was teaching Christie to salsa dance, then her balance betrayed her and she got to know the floor a little better.
As we're catching a cab home, Adam and Bree were leaning on each other, only neither one was in any shape to help the other one out. So they basically tackled each other on the sidewalk.
Finally, after a long night of shit-talking between Mike and me, we got home, cleared out the living room, and had a Pavia battle-royal. It went something like this: Mike was drunk as a skunk so I took advantage of that fact and threw him around the room most of the time. He resisted a bit, then stopped, and I threw him around a little more until I wasted all of my energy and we both laid on the ground drunk and trying to catch our breaths. Good thing we didn't break anything in the living room or Christie would have kicked both of our asses. Oh yeah, after churning all the alcohol up in my stomach, it decided it was time to let it all out...so I had a date with the porcelain.

Sunday: Game Day
We woke up in a frenzy (thanks to Bree's early burst of energy) trying to pull ourselves together and catch the Metra train into downtown Chicago. On the ride in, my dad asks me if I know that the game starts at noon, not one. I said, "No. I'm sure the game is at one." He tells me to check my ticket, and I do, and it says the game is at 1:20PM. The tickets that Mike, Christie and my parents got from friends say the game is at noon, only on Saturday! So Mike and Christie scrambled to get tickets from Craigslist as the rest of us relaxed and recouped on the train. We took the red line subway into Wrigleyville and finally made it to Cubby Bear Tavern to get ready for the Cubs game. I took advantage of the free beer still sitting in my body from the night before, and after a couple morning beverages the shampoo effect started setting in. So eventually Mike, Christie and my parents scalped tickets to get into SUNDAY'S game and we headed into Wrigley Field. Sam and I had tickets we bought online the day they went on sale and Adam, Bree, and Meaghan had tickets in our same row!

Here's how the game went:
After EIGHT first pitches, the game was ready to start, but not before it started downpouring. The rain was on and off for a while, but they wouldn't start the game until it cleared up. Around 1:45 or 2, the weather really started clearing up and we thought the game would start back up. Unfortunately, whoever is making decisions at Wrigley Field is a complete moron. The weather cleared up and an announcement was made saying that thunderstorms were on the way and would be there in an hour. They decided to wait it out and try to start the game AFTER the rain came. Here's the problem...what if the rain never comes?! These people are complete idiots because two hours later the rain finally did come, but they could have played four, five or even six innings by then! What an ass-backwards way of thinking. So thanks to the intelligent people at Wrigley Field, we didn't actually see any baseball yesterday.

We woke up early, took the train into downtown, took the red line to Wrigley, drank at the Cubby Bear, and sat in Wrigley for almost four hours. I'd say we got the whole experience, minus the baseball, so I think it counts towards the whole seeing 30 games in 30 stadiums thing. After the "game," we hustled to catch the train back to the suburbs and picked up some Chicago style deep dish pizza on our way home for dinner. At night, we watched UFC and Entourage, the only two things REALLY worth watching on TV these days. Finally, before crashing for the night my mom, Meaghan, and I watched the worst movie I've seen in a while, The Cutting Edge (even though I've seen it before...shhhh). To my mom's credit, she was so into the movie that she stayed up and watched the whole thing without even dozing off on the couch (a normal occurrence around 9PM).

I had a great weekend spending time with my family and it was especially great to see MY MOM! Today we'll be heading to the White Sox game, and I'm hoping we actually get to see some baseball! Hard to believe it, but we only have three more games and four more days. Almost there...

Matt