Every Mile a Memory (Part 2)

"Dream what you want to dream, go where you want to go, be what you want to be. Because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do." ~Anon.

Well if yesterday's blog wasn't exciting enough for you, today's will hopefully cure that!  I'm continuing on my story of my wild and crazy weekend of going back to OSU for the Remember The Ten run.  If you missed part one, click here.   Now, on to part two.  Part three (which will be my actual serious reflection on the whole emergency landing situation) will come next week.

Allelujah, a Football Game!

This time of year is depressing for me.  There is not a single sporting event that I care about going on.  But luckily for me, OSU loves me and scheduled the Spring Football game when I was in town.  Something to get me through until September!

First off, I have to share a picture that I took with the Fiesta Bowl trophy and Big 12 Championship trophy.  Pretty cool, huh?  I figure since I was there screaming like a crazy person the nights that we won both of these (Big 12 Championship blog and Fiesta Bowl blog), I deserved my photo to be taken with them.  Go Pokes!

SoulMate Friend and I loaded up Little Linebacker for his first OSU football game. 

Turns out, football is not designed for 2 year olds.  He was hot and tired and did not want to sit still very much.  Much to my dismay, he was more interested in the band than the game (it's Tuba Man's genetics here....).  He also really liked seeing Pistol Pete.  We had hoped for a photo of Little Linebacker on the field after the game, but he just couldn't make it that long.  I did snap this one before he had to go for nap time.

I won't bore you with all the details, but here is a quick summary of my thoughts.  I think if we're being honest, it's a 2 man race for quarterback.  Chelf is out in my opinion.  Walsh and Lunt both looked good---if I'm Gundy, I use Walsh now and red-shirt Lunt.  That kid will be a superstar, but you don't have to burn a year of eilligibility now when you have someone like Walsh that can throw the ball.  One thing that concerns me about Walsh is that he's not very tall and had several passes batted down at the line.  But he throws better than I expected.  Remember the name Charlie Moore.  This lanky white kid came out of nowhere and was the star of the spring game.  Great hands.  The replacement for Blackman??  Tracy Moore looked good, as you would have expected.  On special teams, I have two thoughts:  (1) if Quinn Sharp gets hurt, we're screwed....pretty sure I could kick better than our other kickers; and (2) we better work on punt returners catching the ball, I bet they dropped 10 of them and when Gilbert finally caught one, the whole crowd cheered and he took a bow.  Sheesh.  Defense looks good, but not as killer good as everyone has been talking.  The line looks really big and I particularly like the Defensive Ends Cooper Bassett and Jimmy Bean.

Wes Lunt

J.W. Walsh

After the game they let everyone come on the field to meet the players.  It's not nearly as exciting when they just open the ramps for you to go down as it is rushing the field after Bedlam and almost breaking an ankle/getting trampled to death like last time.  But whatever.  My original plan was to try and get pictures just with random, non-popular players.  But my competitive streak kicked in and I bee-lined it for Lunt.  This kid is going to be a rock star.  Go big or go home, I say.  I may have shoved some people out of the way (sorority girls...not little kids) to get in there, but I got my picture.  For the record, if he was not 17 years old, I think we would be quite a good looking couple, no?

Me and our future star QB!

And because as I've mentioned before, I'm always drawn right to the life of the part, I ended up with a picture of me and this dude (Davidell Collins...Junior...Defensive Tackle), who was sporting some crazy fake afro.  He had spunk.  I like that.

The Realization that I'm Old.

There I was, in Stillwater, on a Saturday night.  The Copper Penny should have been calling my name.  Instead, I ate Braums with SoulMate Friend and Tuba Man in our pjs and was in bed, totally asleep by 10:30.  Back in the good ol' days, we didn't even head to the bar until 10:30!  Somewhere in the last 6 years, I have become old.  Sigh.  They say you can't be old and wise unless you were young and crazy.  I think that we did a pretty good job of accomplishing the young and crazy part of that goal back in the day, so I'm going to accept that my time has passed and let the 21 year olds live it up in my place!

The Glory Days.

Emergency Landing.

So after church on Sunday morning and lunch with the Oklahoma Girls, I headed to the airport to fly home.  Due to the brilliant geography knowledge of the airline industry, I was scheduled to fly from Oklahoma City to Kansas City to Albuquerque.  (Yes....that would be flying first in the opposite direction of my destination.)  And so we get to Kansas City and load up all the new passengers and head to Albuquerque.

I was sitting next to the emergency exit row (extra leg room for my sore, tired legs...yes please!)  I noticed some random noise that kept getting louder, but I just turned up my iPod.  Nothing a little Red Dirt music can't fix.  And then I started to feel some strange vibration of the plane.  I chalked that up to turbulance.  Soon, the plane sort of turned to the south, which did not make much sense to me.  I looked out the windows and noticed that we were flying at a significantly lower elevation than we had been about 15 minutes prior.  By this point, I knew something was up.  And sure enough, the pilots came on the speaker and told everyone to remain calm, but that there was a problem with one of the engines so we would be diverting to make an emergency landing in Wichita and we needed to prepare for landing immediately.

 My first thought:  "I didn't put my picture with Eddie Sutton on facebook yet and if we crash, no one will ever know!"  No lie.  That's called bleeding orange, folks.

I've got to tell you, the Southwest pilots and crew did a great job.  There was no panicing on the plane, everyone just did what they were told and things seemed like a normal landing.  Until we caught sight of the runway in Wichita.  There were fire trucks and ambulances with lights blaring all up and down the runway.  That was the only time I got a little jittery and realized that this could actually end badly.  About this point, I had another thought.  "I am sitting by the freaking emergency exit.  I should have paid more attention when they told me to read that safety information card in the seat back pocket in front of me!"  Fortunately, we had a routine landing, you would not have known there was a problem.  Here's a video of the event that was on the local news.

So the fire trucks swarmed us to be sure nothing was actually burning (it was not) and after sitting on the tarmak for an hour, they finally towed the plane to a gate where they unloaded us.  There we are, all 136 passengers stuck in Wichita's airport.  There were only three things there:  bathrooms, a bar, and a bagel restaurant.  

Long story short, we hung out for 4 hours while Southwest sent antother plane to pick us all up.  They gave us free cokes and all the peanuts and pretzels we could eat.  After a couple of Seven and Sevens (to calm the nerves, obviously), a chocolate chip cookie (can we say emotional eater?), and about 15 bags of peanuts (protein, people), I felt quite a bit better.  The flight from Wichita home on the other airplane was completely uneventful and all's well that ends well.  I figure we'll just chalk this up to another adventure and potential book chapter one day!