Becky's Big 3-0

Spent this weekend in Grand Rapids helping Becky celebrate her 30th birthday. As it turns out, Becky can't really handle tequila too well. However, the rest of the celebrants were happy to pick up the slack. We started out with dinner at the Spratke residence. I kept hearing everyone talk of bean dip, must have more bean dip. I'm not sure what Jon's secret ingredients are but I'm starting to wonder if maybe we shouldn't have drug tested some of the guests.A short taxi cab later we were downtown where we ended up at some bar. Don't know the name except it was something like Giardellis. Which led to me thinking about chocolate all night long. There was some speculation that this was a Greek place because the bathroom said unisek. A great number of people seemed to take this to mean "me & my man can pee together!" (sorry no pictures of this).The tequila shooters came back to haunt the birthday girl in a big way so we headed back to the house kind of early. Which was okay, because there was bean dip. Somehow, Brian, Jon and I managed to stay up until 4:30 in the morning, watching the lightening.

The Big Game

Pistons vs. 76ers, Home Opener, November 2, 2005


Mom was lucky enough to get 4 tickets to the opening game for the 2005-2006 Piston’s season. After much consideration, I decided to take my cousin Artie to the game as my date. He’d just had his fifth birthday and this seemed like a pretty awesome present and it would be his first ever game. Of course, he thought of himself as Dad’s date more than mine since Uncle Ron is his best buddy.

Over dinner, we told Artie about all the different players but especially about Big Ben Wallace, mom’s favorite. He was a little confused, not knowing the difference between Big Ben the ball player and Crazy Ben, his cousin in Iowa. By the time the game started, he’d pretty much figured it out. We got these really awesome Ben figurines as the giveaway plus a cool tote backpack.

The start of the game was a little frightening for a young kid, with the fireworks and stuff but then we settled in for the tip off. Artie continued his trend of taking lots of photos of random things. Thank god for digital but I think I am going to have to start carrying around multiple packs of batteries when we are hanging out together.


The game itself wasn’t too interesting. It ended up being a big blow-out with Detroit winning by 20 points. We were hoping for some TV time because the guy in front of us was wearing a big afro wig but since he just sat there wearing the wig and never got off his rump, we didn’t merit enough attention from the cameramen. One section over had PAID to get on the big screen, being the fan section featured in some advertisement for the souvenir shops. In the meantime, Artie was making fast friends with girls sitting behind us. It took most of the 3rd quarter but we finally convinced him to pose for a picture with his 3 new girlfriends. We promised to send the picture to Ben so he would be jealous of Artie the chick magnet. I’m still not sure if he realized it was Ben in Iowa, not Ben the ball player that would be getting the photos.

Before leaving the Palace, we checked out the kind of freaky looking Ben Wallace bobblehead and took one last picture.