How did I forget?

Moments before our guests were to arrive on Friday for game night, I was cleaning out some things from the refrigerator to make room for the new food and drinks we bought for the evening. In doing so, I pulled out a bottle of wine with about a half a glass left in it which I saved from the prior week. We have an air suction thingy that keeps the wine pretty fresh for a day or two, but not over a week by any means. So I took out the air plug and then started to take off the wine collar which I left on for the first time in memory.  But it was stuck. Now, wine collars don't really get stuck per se. Sometimes they are hard to get off, but not stuck. This one was actually STUCK though. It just wouldn't budge. Until it did...which I wasn't prepared for I guess and somehow the fingernail on my middle finger got rammed into something solid or sharp or whatever and ripped a nice big "J" shape down and through my email to the side. Ugh!! Did you just wince a little?  Yeah, everyone has done something like this. I bandaged it up, with LL's help, and went on with the evening. The next day we took off the bandage and examined it. It looked like the nail could be partially saved, preventing the exposure of the soft, soft tissue underneath the nail. So we bandaged it again and waited for Sunday to look further at it as we had to get ready for the Bears game (tailgating started at 3 for the 7:00 game). Sunday morning it looked like we could really save the nail, so LL went out and got some Superglue and I spread it on the break a couple of times to try and keep it on there for a while. We'll see what happens.

But it wasn't all pain and suffering this weekend. We had a friend of LL's staying with us, Pam, which is an inside joke because her name is Anupam and she goes by Anu and hates being called Pam. Well Pam is living in Carbondale currently (very far away) and has never been to a Bears game. Fortunately the guys who sit next to me, The Punkes, weren't going to be at the game and they offered me a few of their tickets which I gladly accepted. So Pam got to experience tailgating and a game! Good fun.

About halfway through the tailgate, a small group of people with microphones and a camera came by the tailgate and asked if I wanted a chance to win some money. Sure!! After finding a relatively quiet area in which to film the segment, the game was on. Turns out they are part of a new local show on one of our sports channels called "GasMoney" in which they ask you 3 questions and you get $10, then another $20 and finally play for another $100 ($130 in total) if you answer them right. Guess who got them all right? Yep! Though I did have some help from the people around (turns out you will draw a relatively large crowd if you start giving away money on television). All three questions were Bears questions and I knew the first two pretty quickly. For the third question he asked me to name one of the pro-bowl offensive linemen from the 1985 Bears, which I did quickly so he asked me to name two, which is where I got help from the crowd.  Hopefully the video will be posted soon and I'll post a link!