{"id":27,"date":"2013-11-09T22:58:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-09T22:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/originalorknot.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2015-04-05T14:50:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-05T19:50:03","slug":"9th-day-of-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"9th Day of Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026or T-minus 19 and counting. Tee-hee.<\/p>\n<p>Today I&#8217;m thankful that I became a sports fan.<\/p>\n<p>I came to love sports relatively late in life. I was in my early forties when I got involved in a new ministry at my church. At the time (in the late 90s) I lived in northwest San Antonio, and went to church at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oxfordumc.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Oxford United Methodist Church<\/a>. It&#8217;s a long story, which I&#8217;ll share\/inflict on you some other time, but I ended up in charge of a group that entertained a group of pregnant women once a month. We did crafts or took them out to eat, or various things, and somehow we ended up with a bunch of free tickets to a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/San_Antonio_Iguanas\" target=\"_blank\">San Antonio Iguanas<\/a> game. The group went\u2026and I absolutely <i><b>LOVED<\/b><\/i> it. I went back all by myself, entranced enough with the game to drive across town and sit alone. <i>Loved<\/i>. it.<\/p>\n<p>After we moved to the Metroplex, we went to a (then) <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fort_Worth_Brahmas\" target=\"_blank\">Fort Worth<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brahmas.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Brahmas<\/a> game. I loved that, too. Sometime later Nokia, where Rich was employed, offered its employees half price tickets to a <a href=\"http:\/\/stars.nhl.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dallas Stars<\/a> game. We went. I was in heaven. Rich said, &#8220;You know, you enjoy this so much, we should do it again.&#8221; Cut to the present, where we&#8217;ve had full season tickets for some years now.<\/p>\n<p>And I still love it.<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t see as many baseball games, maybe two a month or so. We haven&#8217;t been to any Mavs games, but I&#8217;ve seen the Spurs play a few times (fantastic!), and I&#8217;d happily go to a Cowboys game if someone else would finance it. I watch them all (plus soccer) on TV, loving it and grateful that I developed this surprising (to me) interest that I enjoy SO much, even if it did take me a while to get around to it.<\/p>\n<p>So mwah, Stars! Mwah, <a href=\"http:\/\/texasrangers.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Texas Rangers<\/a>! Mwah, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nba.com\/spurs\/\" target=\"_blank\">Spurs<\/a> (and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mavs.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mavs<\/a>)! Mwah, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dallascowboys.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cowboys<\/a>! Thanks for all the good times! I <b><i>am<\/i><\/b> thankful!<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\" href=\"http:\/\/originalorknot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/187035870_slide.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/originalorknot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/187035870_slide.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"216\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026or T-minus 19 and counting. Tee-hee. Today I&#8217;m thankful that I became a sports fan. I came to love sports relatively late in life. I was in my early forties when I got involved in a new ministry at my church. At the time (in the late 90s) I lived in northwest San Antonio, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/originalorknot.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}