Thomas and I just got back from another exciting evening with the Gwinnett Gladiators, and what a night it was! The visiting team was the Alaska Aces who, unfortunately for them, lost 5 – 0. There was much cool stuff tonight, which began even before the game started.

First, we had excellent seats, directly behind the visitor’s bench. We arrived about 40 minutes before play started to watch them practice. As we were sitting there watching, one of the Aces came into the box and Thomas started a-waving at him. The player, Smith I think it was, turned around and hit the ice, apparently without noticing him. He came back within about 5 seconds, picked up a new stick, tapped on the glass with his old stick to get Thomas’ attention, and then gave Thomas his stick! That was extremely cool and prompted Thomas to say “I’m going to cheer for that team tonight!”. Then during the second intermission, they drive a Cadillac truck onto the ice, with Maximus, the team mascot, firing t-shirts into the crowd with a t-shirt gun. Thomas was jumping and flailing about trying to get one, when a guy walks up to the glass, gets my attention and then lobs one underhand over the glass to make sure he gets one. And if that weren’t enough, when they dropped coupons for Buffalo’s Cafe from the ceiling, a woman pointed out to Thomas where one had fallen, so he got one of those too! What an evening.

Unfortunately there are only two more home games this season. I sure wish we had discovered them sooner. We’re going to take in one of the final two, but then we have to wait until October. Ah well, it will be worth it.

BTW, all three photos were taken with my LG VX6000 cameraphone. The first one I took two weeks ago at our second game. The bottom two were actually taken by Thomas at tonight’s game.