Football Weekend

As you may have noticed, last weekend was my first Aggie football game as a member of the Corps. With football weekends come quite a hectic schedule, though not quite as bad as the rest of the week.

The football weekend really starts on Friday night at Midnight Yell (don't bother asking what time it's at). At Midnight Yell, we get to hang out for a bit in Kyle Field and yell our heads off. We also get stories and jokes from the Yell leaders. It's a great time, but I wish it was a little earlier, because we got up at 5:15 that morning. Needess to say, on Saturday I was exhausted.

On Saturday morning we had to get up early for marching practice, since this would be our first real march in. You could tell the upperclassmen were fairly nervous from the way they frantically rearranged, reorganized, and yelled at us. Even all the practice didn't do the job, since one or two fish were still out of step during the march around Kyle. We had a brief period after the march in to gather water and tickets before going to the game itself. During that time I was supposed to get a picture with Ross and Caleb, but Ross never showed up. Apparently he had to be in "boot line", when the seniors make a path for the football players onto Kyle.

The game itself was not that great. With about ten minutes to go the Aggies were up 14-9, so all the fish started to take the brass off of their uniforms and head to the field level to tackle the Yell Leaders. When the Aggies win, the fish are supposed to chase down and tackle the Yell Leaders, then take them to the Fish Pond and throw them in. Unfortunately for us, Arkansas came back with four minutes left and all us fishies were left standing awkwardly on the edge of the field.

In other news, I've been doing a lot of boot pulling. When the seniors come back from class and want to get out of uniform, they cannot get their boots off on their own. So they call for a fish to pull boots. It's a win-win situation, since the senior can get his boots off and the ifsh is often rewarded with some candy or just some normal talking time with a senior. Occasionally they'll also give tips on uniform care or time management. It's worth the effort.

I personally am still doing fine, though I expect life is not going to be so easy for much longer. We've been having major messups all week which means we're going to get smoked a lot, and I couldn't manage to get enough pushups to pass my Physical Fitness Test, so I'm on remedial PT. That means every day I'll be getting up an hour leader and training with some really mad sophomores.