…how much I *big puffy heart* our seats at MerchantsAuto.com Stadium? They are just SO much better than the season mini-plan seats we had last year, and every time we go, I find more reasons to love these seats more.

Yesterday, in addition to giving away stupid pink Fisher Cats caps for all women who appear to be of childbearing age or above mothers, it was also Irish Day at the ballpark. There was some pre-game entertainment, see picture in my last post. You did know that you can set up Flickr so that you can photoblog from your camera phone, right?

But someone, I think it was some store called Celtic Crossing, which is in Portsmouth, NH, was giving out these annoying-assed plastic horns. They had a table on the concourse with tons of these horns on it, in addition to regular merchandise. Plus, they had people handing them out all over the place.

These things were annoying as hell, with all of the kids running around blowing them. As Mike put it, it sounded like “someone is torturing geese”. Yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty appropriate description!

But going back to why we love our new seats so much…there is NO ONE sitting behind us! We are in the last row, behind home plate, and on the aisle. Since this is a small minor league ballpark, these seats are not far from the field at all…the picture of the Irish entertainment in my last post was taken from our seats, so you can see that they’re pretty good seats.

We’d wanted the last row because we were tired of little kids kicking at the backs of our seats, as happened frequently with our old seats. And aisle seats, because when we gotta go, we gotta go, if you get my drift. Between drinking beer, and Mike having to take water pills, not having to climb over people to run to the restrooms is a plus.

Anyhoo, our seats can’t be kicked at, because there is nothing but the concrete of the concourse behind them. There aren’t even any handicapped seats directly above ours, nothing there but a garbage can and a big metal pole.

In our old seats, no doubt there would be a bunch of kids sitting behind us, not only kicking our seats nonstop, but blowing those damned horns DIRECTLY INTO OUR EARS! And you just KNOW that they would have stayed for the full nine innings. So, as annoying as those horns were, at least we didn’t have to suffer having them blown two inches away from our ears.

We’ve also found that if we try to say something to the parents of seat-kickers/hornblowers, etc, they become all huffy, and encourage the kids to annoy us even more. People can be such serious assholes. I swear, if I ever get any baby shower invitations, I will only attend if the parents-to-be are the sort who would not allow their kids to act like this, to annoy other people in public, and defend and even encourage their child’s bad behavior. Damned if I’m going to go out and buy a onesie for some baby who may grow up to kick the back of my seat at some ballpark or theater one day!

Anyhoo, since we really love this ballpark, and don’t want to stop going there, asking for new seats when I renewed the mini-plan was the best way to go. The ticket guy was so nice, he worked with me to get me exactly what I was looking for. I need to make him a card to say thank you. I will be renewing them every year forever, or at least for as long as they keep offering the Sunday home games mini-plan!

Oh, you may be wondering…”if she hates those damned horns so much, then why on earth did she take one?” Well, it’s pretty simple. I saw some kid with one who took the shamrock part off of the rest of the horn. When I saw that, I thought that the shamrock end would make a really nice cookie cutter, in case I ever want to make St. Patrick’s Day cookies.

And, no, I didn’t sit there and blow the horn and annoy the nice people sitting in front of us. I just took the thing, stuck it in my bag, and that was it.
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After the game, we went to this bar called the Wild Rover Pub, in Manchester. Fitting with the Irish theme of the day, but we also chose it because it wasn’t likely to be the sort of place to bring the whole fam damily for Mother’s Day. We know that that’s like, once we forgot it was Mother’s Day, and tried to go out to a nice place for brunch; Mike’s birthday fell on Mother’s Day that year. Well, suffice to say that we won’t be making THAT mistake again!

The Wild Rover is a bit of a dive, but in a good way. The food is very good…last night I had the fish & chips, the fish were breaded with a beer batter made from Harp lager, which I was also drinking while we were there. Mike prefers Guinness, and Irish bars are really the only places who know how to pour it properly.
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Oh, by the way, I managed to dodge the frou-frou pink hat giver-outers at the ball game, as well. I was prepared to tell them exactly what I thought of this pinkified, girlified sports gear crap, should they try to force one on me, but I didn’t have to.

It was all in all a nice day and a good time!