It's never too late to learn

However it does seem like it's too late to learn to blog on a regular basis! I have been in a serious blog writing void. Not sure why to tell you the truth. Yes, I'm busy, but I've been busy over the years and have never been this bad at updating. Oh well. I'll just try to do better.

Today was another Bears game, a short week after the Monday night game, and the game was at noon which meant we were at the parking deck at 8. LL did not feel like she could enjoy herself over an 8+ hour period while fighting off nausea and the cold weather. As she has been feeling nauseous over the last few weeks and getting along in the pregnancy (20 weeks today), I realized I was going to have to find alternate company to the Bears games. But who? And what if LL actually got over the nausea and is fine to go to the game? Substitutes were definitely needed, but they had to be last minute substitutes potentially. Markakis filled this role for me last year quite admirably, for at least two games, but I wanted to spread around the invites this year so I sent out emails to 9 friends and asked if they were interested in being on the list to be a last minute sub. Eight of them said yes, which led to another problem: how do I choose? To the internet! 

It's amazingly easy to find a random number generator on the web, so I gave each friend a number and ran the program. It spat out Ricardo as the first candidate. Unfortunately for Ricardo though, he was going to be in Wisconsin at his cabin this weekend. On to number 2! And the winner was: Markakis! Too funny. And as an added surprise, Benny Baseball and George bought tickets from E-Money and joined the shindig today. Here's the pic!

That's Benny Baseball, George, me, Markakis, E-Money, Dougie Jr. and Jonathan (his brother) with John in the background there in the gray hat. Good times!

Part of the good times was due to the booze of course, but it was also the food. Today, since we were there early in the morning, I went with the Hogs in a Blanket (sausage links wrapped in a croissant), cheesy-sausage-bread (recipe from Blind Mender's mom) and the traditional egg McMuffin like sandwich. Good stuff for the morning, especially when mixed with hot cider and rum. It was my first time making the bread and I had to cut down the recipe (to only a third of the batch) to make it more manageable for the tailgate. One pack of sausages (14) for the Hogs worked out perfect as well. I mention the numbers because I'll probably forget next year! For after the game, it was bacon wrapped dates and figs (one pack of bacon worth only) and then hamburgers. 

One of the guests brought jalapenos stuffed with chorizo and cheese and wrapped in bacon. They were awesome, but they gave me the hiccups! How crazy is that? Apparently not crazy at all. So that was something else I learned (in addition to making the bread for the first time). In addition to those things, I realized that I could clean my grill more easily if I brought my metal brush scrubber from home that I use on my big grill and clean the portable grill's grates while they were hot. It worked like a charm! Cleanup was sooooo much easier! Forty-six and still learning!