A couple weeks ago I was riding the elevator and noticed on the elevator TV (what, your elevator doesn’t have a TV?) that they were offering Medieval Times tickets 50% off.
And Joey’s birthday was coming up.
Well, my Seminary Wife brain clicked on and thought, Well….we’ve never done THAT before….might as well give it a shot.
So I bought tickets.
Not for the night of Joey’s actual birthday, which was Thursday of last week, but for last night.
Traffic was an absolute nightmare, so we took a different route and made it there in fairly record time, which pleased me because usually when we take alternate routes it winds up taking us longer. But we got lucky this time, probably because it was Joey’s birthday. Or maybe just because our number was up.
We arrived early, like the ticket told us to do, and fortunately we had brought my iTouch because we wound up having to stand in this large entrance hall with about 1,000 middle schoolers for about an hour and a half. And I like middle schoolers considerably more than most of you (because I’m almost a youth pastor’s wife) but nearly 1,000 of them in close quarters for an hour and a half with nothing to do is enough to make me want to jump in front of a Mack truck on the Stemmons Freeway.
Joey noticed me getting that wild I AM FEELING CLAUSTROPHOBIC look in my eyes and he knew that it was time to find a different place to stand. So he whisked me away to a less cramped part of the waiting area and we sat on a bench that me miraculously found and played Monopoly on my iTouch for the next 45 minutes.
It was a long wait.
Also it was 8:00 and I hadn’t had dinner, and that makes everything worse.
Finally, it was time to enter and we poured into the arena with all the middle schoolers. (I do not understand how it was basically us and I AM NOT JOKING about the 1,000 middle schoolers. We counted.)
And those discount tickets I got?
Were in the worst possible seats in the entire place. Like when I say worst possible seats I mean that we were in the back corner with 1/4 of the arena blocked by the place where the king and queen sit, and my chair was an inch from falling down some stairs if I made one wrong move. (Which, incidentally, I did and then I fell down the stairs.)
But we’re used to our cheap tickets getting us lousy seats, so we sat up there and giggled like middle schoolers (when in Rome…) and wiggled while we waited for our food.
Our waiter came and filled our plastic cups up with Pepsi, and Joey looked at me guzzling mine with wide terrified eyes as he sneaked a peak at his watch. It was 8:30, and we all know how Pepsi trips me out on caffeine. But I told him that I hadn’t had Pepsi in two weeks, so I would surely be fine.
Whatever.
Soon our soup and garlic bread came and as we sat waiting for the waiter to FINALLY get to us already. He was just about to serve the person next to us (who was actually not a middle schooler) when he said, “Would you like some garlic bread sir?”
Then there was this awkward pause, and the server finally realized his mistake and said, “I’m sorry, MA’AM, would you like some garlic bread? Sorry, I just….the eye patch….one of the guys downstairs has an eye patch.”
The lady next to us was indeed wearing an eye patch, which I had been trying not to stair at. She continued to stare, one-eyed, at the server, and he continued to ramble.
“The guy downstairs is a Knight and he was sword fighting and a piece of Titanium came flying off one of the swords and got stuck in his eye.” Then he paused long enough for the eye-patched lady to speak.
“Well, I had a brain anuerism and now I can’t see out of this eye,” she said, obviously peeved.
“Oh. Well, do you want some garlic bread?” Asked the poor server again as he mentally tried to calculate how much THAT mistake was going to cost him on his tip.
When he finally got around to serving us we were so hungry that we totally inhaled our garlic bread and soup, and then we sat in our super bad nosebleed seats and tried to calculate how much money Medieval Times was pulling down every time they opened their doors. Joey figured it out, after some quick calculations, and we were like, woaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.
And then, the jousting began.
We screamed just like the middle schoolers until the Pepsi wore off and we started getting tired and feeling our age. And as soon as it was done? We hit the road, Jack and booked it home before all the middle schoolers made their way to the doors.
“Want to stay up and watch the Olympics that we recorded?” Joey asked as we sped up Central Expressway.
“Pssssh, YES,” I squealed.
And we stayed up until 12:15 screaming at our TV while we watched short track and bobsled crashes.
Our poor neighbors. They must really worry about us these days what with all this yelling at the TV that we do, and of course we do it about 2 feet from the only wall we share in our entire apartment.
Speaking of, it’s almost Olympics time.
And we know where my priorities are.
So whatever I was going to type in this post is now irrelevant because I have only two more days to bask in Olympic glory until have to wait 2 1/2 more years to do it all over again.
