Well, my life is staying interesting, I'll say that much. Look out, this is a long one.

Friday. Amanda and I finally had our apartment-warming party, three or four months late. If you know me very well, you know that I'm massively apprehensive about parties, mostly because I have a deep-seated fear that no one will show up. Some of that was always manifested in my musical life, where friends would routinely shun invitations to come see bands I'm playing in, but it predates that by a lot. I actually did throw a party in college, and to say it was poorly attended would be an understatement.

In short, I shouldn't have worried. I had a fair number of people tell me they were coming, so I felt good about that coming in. Early on, however, it looked like it might be a particularly low-key affair, but we started early, so things had plenty of time to pick up. And pick up they did. Amanda got her invitations out late, and subsequently didn't get many confirmed responses, but I think she was pretty happy with her turnout as well. What I liked was that I managed to span quite a large stretch of my Chicago existence with the attendees. Soccer friends, music friends (at least the non-full time professionals, who tend to be working on Friday nights), the Sunday Dinner crowd, and even some Internet friends made it out, and a fun time seemed to be had by all. Noticeably absent were ANY former co-workers from any job I've had (save Lisa, but she's Amanda's best friend now), and friends from college (save Amanda, who, um, lives here). That's not surprising, but still somewhat curious.

And the apartment won high marks. It really is a great place, and apparently "self-healing," as Amanda put it. We had the bulk of it clean within less than an hour after everybody left. Pretty amazing, actually.

Saturday. One of the reasons we had to have the party Friday is that I was planning to go to Columbus for the Fire-Crew match the next day. What changed during the week was that I wasn't going as a fan, but once again as the voice of the Fire on WBIG 1280 out of Aurora. Since I already had booked a spot on a charter bus going between Irish pubs here and there, I decided to stick with that form of transport. We were scheduled to arrive in Columbus by maybe 4:30 at the latest, so getting to the stadium well in advance of the 7:30 kickoff should be no problem, right?

Wrong. This was quite possibly the clusterfuck by which all other clusterfucks will be measured. The Fire Ultras, a group of mostly Polish and mostly notorious Fire supporters, constituted about half of the bus passengers, and the trip was encouraging alcohol consumption from the included breakfast at 7:30am on. Do you see maybe where this is going? Anyway, the tone was set when one of the two drivers immediately got on people's cases for bringing bottled beer on the bus, which hadn't been expressly forbidden ahead of time, as far as we knew. By and large, the Ultras take issue with authority, especially when they're drunk, and this guy was coming across like a military drill instructor of the highest order. So when, somewhere in Indiana, it was brought to his attention that someone had been smoking in the bathroom and that a beer can had been thrown in the toilet, all hell broke loose. In confronting the increasingly drunken guys in the back of the bus, said driver was subjected to some typical intoxicated bravado, which he interpreted as a threat. An hour and a visit from an Indiana State Trooper later, we were admonished, deprived of the beer kegs that came with the bus, threatened with being thrown off the bus if we didn't behave like very sober people, and on our way. Except now somebody was hungry, so we stopped again, still in Indiana, for what was supposed to be a half-hour and was actually twice that.

Now we were cutting it close, so the decision was made to forgo the bar on the Columbus end of the trip and proceed directly to the stadium, which looked to get us there around 6:30 or so. Still no problem, although I would have to get regular PBP man Chris Doran, who was once again on the TV side, to pretape the interview with coach Bob Bradley. Except that the game tickets were at the bar, which was all the way on the other side of the city. Another half-hour at least, but that was a conservative estimate. We finally pulled into the stadium around twenty minutes after 7pm, and naturally, went in the wrong entrance. At this point, I told the driver to let me off, and sprinted through the parking lot and all the way around the stadium to reach the media gate. I'm thinking I just might make it before we go on the air, until I find out that the visiting radio booth is back on the other side of the stadium. More sprinting, this time through throngs of people wandering the concourse as the game is getting set to start. I completely ran over an eight-year old kid, and both of us went sprawling. I sincerely hope he was okay, but I really didn't have time to check.

Winded and scraped, I finally made it to the broadcast booth during the second commercial break of the broadcast. Color commentator and injured Fire player Evan Whitfield started without me, and Squire was standing by if necessary. But I made it, and the show went on. I feel like I made more mistakes this time than the last, but I felt much more comfortable making them. Unfortunately, the Fire added to the overall misery of the day by putting in a lackluster effort and dropping their fourth straight.

So, back to the bus. Our authority-loving driver yelled at someone to sit down, and was promptly told to fuck off, at which point he grabbed some local police to escort the offending party off the bus. This then triggered a mass exodus of the Ultras in a drunken show of solidarity. The upshot was that the bus ride home was much quieter and devoid of homemade Polish hooligan videos. I made it back home be about 4am, some 21 hours after this odyssey began, and crashed hard.

The moral of the story? Happy drunk people at party, good. Stupid drunk people at soccer games, bad. Or something.