Brian Gallimore's Blog

Bryan called me last minute and told me he had two extra tickets to the Texas Tech / Texas A&M game this weekend.  He said a friend of his had a spot to tailgate before the game. 

What an excellent opportunity.  If there is one football game a year that I want to watch, it is this one, plus being fed and having beer on tap, I had to go.

I had visions of tailgating.  I remember cooking hot dogs in the bed of my truck before a game once.  It was fun.  I was not prepared for what I saw at this place!  First of all, it was pretty easy to find, you just had to spot the huge M35 “Deuce and a Half” with the broken longhorns on the grill.

This was a military surplus 6×6 wheel drive supply vehicle with an all-fuel six-cylinder engine and outfitted with the special tailgate beer-keg dispensing system and Aggie propaganda.  (oh yes, that is in fact Shiner Bock on the right)

Chuck and Tim (the “master tailgaters”) also had a special cooking trailer.  In addition to the standard smoker box and large cooking surface, it had stainless steel work surfaces, integrated dual propane burners, rhino-lined storage box, built in ice-cooler, water dispenser, and canopy.  Very nice!

The guys cooked up a heck of a feast.   Brisket, ribs, dove, sausage, stuffed jalapenos, beans, french-fries, and I don’t remember what else.

Oh yea, there was a football game too.  I forgot what it was like to sit in Kyle field with almost 86,000 other people.  Not just any people, they are Aggies.  These people are crazy.  Crazy or not, it was a great game.  I say great not just because Tech won, but because it was exciting.  We were able to catch a pass to make the winning touchdown in the last minute of the game.  It was close. 

After the game, we went back to the M35, where Tim was cooking hamburgers and hotdogs now.  After waiting for the sun to go down, we made the drive back home. 

We went to the doctor for Amber’s 12-week visit.  We were able to see the baby move, see its hands and feet, and measured the heartbeat.  The baby is 6cm long right now.

Eight of us drove up north and played paintball today.  We were able to play several different games.  At one point, we had to stop playing because of the massive amounts of rain pouring down.  Most of us battled fogged lenses all day, making it pretty hard to see what you were doing.  I lost track of time because we were having so much fun.  My team had a hard time getting the objectives, but in the last battle of the game, we were triumphant. 

Here are a few more pictures, thanks to Jim:

One the way up highway 24, we noticed that DPS officers were out everywhere.  We went over one bridge, and saw a K-9 unit out looking for something, and a guy with a flack jacket labeled “secret service”.  A helicopter was seen also.  We knew something was up, but weren’t sure what it was.  It turns out that the president of Pakistan was going up to the Paris, TX hospital.  From theparisnews.com:

A line of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and Secret Service agents are part of a high-security convoy on Saturday Sept. 23, 2006, transporting Gen. Pervez Musharraf, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to Paris Regional Medical Center.

It started out innocent enough… testing my marker to make sure it worked right.  I was having trouble with it last time I had it out, so I wanted to know if I needed to work on it before next week’s game.  I dumped a pod of balls with no issues, so I figured it looked good.

I shut off the air and headed inside.  As I was walking through the house, I decided to “de-pressurize” the marker by pulling the trigger a few times, a common practice to save your tank o-ring. 

I guess it had been a while since I had done something REALLY stupid, so my time was up.  I failed to completely empty the hopper outside, and now I PLANTED a paintball in the carpet!  That would have been bad enough, but (as paintballs do) it burst and splattered all over the place.  Little droplets of gooey, pink paint in the carpet, doors, floor, walls, ceiling, and on the pictures hanging on the wall.

The doors are painted with enamel, no problem wiping that up.  Linoleum floor, no problem.  The carpet cleaner did a good job on all the little droplets, but the direct impact point will be pink forever.  Flat wall paint, no chance of cleaning that up either, it just happily absorbs whatever pigment you put on it next.  Here are some of the pre-cleanup pictures. 

I think I will go back to my gun safety rules:  “never shoot at something you don’t want to shoot” isn’t that one of them?   Or maybe it was mom, “take that outside!”  Either works in this case.

We have been waiting to tell everyone the big news until now.  As of last week, Amber was 8 week pregnant with our first child.  The due date is mid-April.  We are very excited, and I am sure we will become very busy as things progress.  We are going in for another ultrasound at 12 weeks.