Pulling off the Surprise

Andy had been talking about coming home for a weekend this summer, hoping to coordinate his schedule with that of a Cardinals home game. After bouncing around some dates, he emailed me one night suggesting that he fly home for Father's Day weekend as a surprise for his dad. What did I think? And oh, by the way, did we have Cardinal tickets for that weekend? I told Andy that Jim and I were going to see "Wicked" Friday night (which was totally awesome, by the way) and he said that was fine since he didn't get into St. Louis until 8:00 and he would just have Katie come and pick him up. Okay, on to issue 2 - ball tickets. I called Jim's partner who advised that the only tickets they had for this weekend was Friday night. Well, that wasn't going to work. Our season tickets are shared by 3 different groups, and then we further split our group of tickets with an architectural firm. I called our friend Pat from the architectural office, and he said they didn't have the tickets for that weekend either. But Pat said he knows a lot of people with season tickets, and he would put out some feelers for me. I told him even if he could only get 2 seats, I would take them. He came through for me with 2 seats in the 5th row behind the Cardinal dugout. Nice! These are even a little closer than our own season tickets, which are great seats.

So now 5 people know of the surprise, but we told no one else. Loose lips sink ships, as I found out when Jim's sister spilled the beans regarding a surprise 40th birthday party I had put together some years back. Now all I needed to do was make sure Jim didn't have a motorcycle trip planned for this weekend. I was concerned because it had been 2 weeks since he was last able to ride, so I knew he would be antsy. The last I had heard he was just going to get together over breakfast with a small group of riders who are heading for a week long trip to Wisconsin next month. That would work just fine.

But then yesterday he drops on me that he is getting up at 5:30 on Saturday to meet his buddy and they were riding down to St. Genevieve to pick up another rider and head out for the day. Drats! Oh well, once he learned Andy was in town he could decide if he still wanted to go. When we got home from "Wicked" about 11:30, Andy popped into the kitchen from around the corner and Jim was dumbstruck. At first he thought Katie had a male friend over, and then it sunk in. He was quite surprised, so we pulled it off. Yay!

We didn't get to bed until 1:00 since we were catching up with Andy. He and Megan have not been here since Christmas, so there was a lot to discuss. The 5:30 alarm was pretty ugly this morning. As it ended up it was raining out, so they canceled the ride. At 7:00 the alarm company called to advise that the power was off at the composting facility. At that point, I decided to just get up. The rest of my family managed to sleep until after 9:00, the bums.

So now the guys are at the game, Katie is off to Jake's birthday party, and I have the house to myself. It just might be time for a bubble bath. Ahhhhhh....