Yesterday (well, technically, the day before yesterday now) the Oklahoma Sooners "hung half-a-hundred" on the Chatanooga Mocs at Owen Field. And I was there. For half of it, anyway. My oldest daughter’s best friend’s dad wasn’t using his tickets and gave them to me. I have very few male friends around here who like football, and even fewer who can be reached on short notice. So, I took my youngest son; my second ever live OU game was his first.

I don’t know what it’s like at other stadiums, but at OU’s, the benches have numbers on them that correspond to your ticket. Yeah, that’s normal. But if your butt is wider than the one-inch stenciled number, you can pretty much forget about sitting in anything like comfort. The stadium holds something like 80,000, but people are sitting on each others’ laps. Until the game starts, then nobody sits down, but you’re still packed in so tight you can’t cheer without delivering an uppercut to the poor sap next to you. So, picture that … thousands of people decked out in crimson and cream, crammed hip to hip and flowing down the aisles before the game started. My six-year-old boy was a bit overwhelmed by it. He just stared and clutched the foam finger I’d promised him to his chest as he watched the Sooner faithful get ready for another season.

Then the pre-game stuff started … the band came out and played "Oklahoma" while a state flag as long as the field is wide was unfurled. The inflatable schooner was put in place and pretty soon this year’s national champion Sooners were pouring onto the field and the crowd was going wild. On Sooner kickoffs, the fans hold up a finger (not THAT finger) and sustain an "Ooooooooh" until the ball’s kicked and a gun is fired. Jake really liked that. And it happened a lot. After the second or third time, Jake looked up at me with his big brown eyes and exclaimed, "I love football!" That’s my boy.

With just under seven minutes left in the second quarter, OU pulled Sam Bradford and started putting in backups. Then the excitement kinda drained out of the crowd as the score just kept climbing. It got so bad that people weren’t even standing up to cheer for the touchdowns. A cool wind kicked up, the score become 50-0, and Jake told me he was ready to go. We left at halftime, and were about halfway back to my truck when the heavens were ripped open by lightning and rain came down in buckets. By the time we got to the truck we were drenched, and it was raining so hard we could barely see the highway coming home.

"I love football!" Finally! My wife goes to sleep during games and my other three kids don’t care for it, but finally I have one who loves football. Now we just need to find a way to get to a Vikings game …

In other news, I entered this three-day weekend hoping to hit the 10,000 word mark on The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. I have not been as diligent as I should. I still have a ways to go, but here’s the current count (insert thank-yous to carriejones for she knows what).

6,562 / 60,000 (10.9%)

Speaking of Carrie, here’s a quote from Girl, Hero, a book you gotta read. “Sometimes I am so weird I can’t handle myself.” Well, it cracked me up when I read it last night.

I keep forgetting that I also need to write a bonus story to be included with the lettered edition of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. I know what I’m going to write, and so I have this feeling I’ve already done it.