It's Friday and it's "THAT" Weekend

You know the weekend I mean, I'm sure.

And it started early.  The persecution, I mean.  Some years, it's worse than others.  This is one of those years where it's worse.

A few days back, there was a gunman on the Texas campus.  It was on the news which was expected.  Otter said that whenever there's been a school shooting anywhere, there has been at least an announcement made at her school and some sort of special, appropriate comments in memory/honor of the victims whether they died or not.  Not this time.  Nothing was said.  But something would have been said if it had been any other school besides Texas.  I can just about guarantee that.

Well, something was said by an ou player.  (No capital letters here, not for this one).  He said that he wished all other Texas students would do what the gunman did.  Which was to kill himself.  And apparently, it's the Texas fans/team/family members fault that he was banned from the game.  (Yeah, right!).  Obviously, we always want Texas to win.  But sometimes we don't and we understand that.  We've won the last 3 years in a row.  But after the player's comments, we'd like to see Texas absolutely decimate ou this year.  We're not the only ones.

Then today, something else happened.  Bill got pulled over on the turnpike.  We have what are called pike passes, they are an electronic reader that fits inside the car on the windshield.  We have an account set up with the turnpike authority, we go through the special lanes at the toll booth and the amount is deducted from our account.  When it gets to a certain point, we get a light that tells us that our balance is low and then they send a bill out to replenish the account.  The light came on this week, but the low level on the account is still high enough so that there is time for the bill to get mailed out and the payment mailed back.  Bill was coming home this afternoon and after he went through the toll booth, he saw a state trooper who was actually in the other lane start to pass him.  Then the trooper suddenly pulled back and got behind Bill.  And lit his lights.  Bill did what he was supposed to do, he pulled over and got his driver's license and insurance card out.  The trooper tried to tell Bill that he (Bill) had come through the toll lane illegally.  When Bill pointed out the pike pass and told him (politely) that the light was not the toll evasion or violation late but in fact was the low balance light, the trooper than took his id (but not the insurance card!) and the pike pass, and went back to his cruiser.  After he called in for information and found nothing on Bill he could get him for, he had the gall to say that he thought the pikepass was STOLEN.  To which Bill replied that that meant that someone must have broken into his car and switched the pike pass and if that was the case, then he wanted to make a police report right now.  I think that is when the IDIOT trooper realized that a) Bill had done nothing wrong and b) Bill was not even close to being intimidated.  So he gave Bill a warning and not a ticket, the warning says it's for improper entrance to a turnpike.  But what it should really say is that the trooper is a childish ou fan who tried to find a reason to ticket Bill for one reason and one reason only:  the Longhorn emblem on the back of the car.  Bill could tell exactly when the trooper saw it, and that's when the jerk decided that he needed to pull Bill over.

It's not the first time that this has happened to us.  It probably won't be the last.  I have also heard of very similar things happening to other people with Texas insignia on their cars and it's almost always this particular weekend.

We drive especially carefully around this time, because as I said this is not the first time we've had someone with a chip on his shoulder.

The UPS guy that delivered something to work told me that he bought a hat at Six Flags that has something about Texas on it and he is amazed that he gets harrassed when he wears it.  He said that he's not even from this area, he's from Virginia and he doesn't even have a dog in this fight but he still gets a hard time when he has his hat on.

All I had to deal with today is being tailgated extremely closely by what was obviously a very irate ou fan (I could see his shirt in the rear view mirror) who very obviously went out of his way to get behind me and then looked furious when I didn't pull over to get out of his way or speed up.  I was going what the rest of the traffic was going, which was well under the speed limit because of the amount of cars on a street with several lights.  My car has an emblem as well.

And even though the color clashes, I wore my burnt orange golf shirt with the Longhorn logo today.  We wear our assorted Texas t-shirts on a regular basis and my cell phone holder is burnt orange with the Longhorn logo.  We also have burnt orange ball caps with Longhorn logos and we wear them often.  And there are times when we fly the Texas flag.

Tomorrow will be one of those flag flying days.