Roughly three weeks ago I introduced Cathy to the TV show Ted Lasso.

I’m not great at telling people what a TV show is about without giving away too much detail so I told her it’s a comedy about an American football coach who becomes a coach for a premier soccer team in England.

She wasn’t completely sold but figured she would give it a try because we had plans to go to the New Mexico United game on July 9.

The first night we watched it, we had gone on a walk earlier that night. We plan for our walks to start at 7 p.m., but she normally never shows up to my house until 7:10 p.m. That night, I was quite surprised when I heard a knock on my door at 6:55 p.m., which meant that I had to quickly get ready to go as I thought I still had another 15 minutes.

As we began our walk, we quickly realized that the sky looked like it was going to open up very, very soon. We did our normal loop and as we were walking back to the plaza, there was lightning right in front of us.

The two of us started sprinting back to my place and Cathy said how she thought she signed up for a walk, not a sprint. We had really great timing as it started to downpour a few minutes after we got inside.

We didn’t know how long it was going to rain for so we decided to start Ted Lasso and have ice cream sundaes.

Cathy wasn’t too sure what to expect, but ended up spending the next two hours laughing. She was commenting about how great the show and the characters are and how it definitely was not what she expected.

We watched the second half of the first season, except for the finale, last Monday. It was another night filled with laughter and popcorn.

On Friday, we went up to Albuquerque to watch the United game. Cathy came over to my house after work and I gave her a jersey to wear for the night.

After we parked, we hung out with Mike and Yolanda, who are two of the parking attendants that I have known since March of 2019.

It started to rain a few minutes later so Yolanda had Mike come out to sell the tickets so her hair wouldn’t get ruined. We spent the next hour under their tent waiting for the rain, thunder and lightning to pass. The rain kept coming into the tent so Yolanda would hold an umbrella wherever it was coming in to try to keep all of us from getting wet.

Yolanda and Cathy spent some time making fun of me for bringing ice skates with me to New Mexico.

Once the rain started to clear up, we went to say hi to my other United friends.

I saw Rachel and Daelynn, but Daelynn didn’t see me coming so I snuck up and scared her. After talking with Rachel for a few minutes, she went to go get food and Daelynn said she wanted to stay with me. I ended up watching her and her best friend for a little while, which resulted in me chasing her around and tickling her.

Cathy and I then decided we were hungry and walked to Chick-Fil-A. Other people also had that idea as there were roughly 10 people in there with United jersey’s on.

Once we got back to the parking lot at UNM, Yolanda told us how worried they were as it took us longer than they expected it to. They both felt better once we said it was because we ate there and they told us how they weren’t going to leave until they knew we made it back.

It was then time to head into the stadium. I said hi to Renee and then Cathy and I walked around the stadium for a while before heading to our seats.

Cathy had no idea what to expect with sitting in the supporters section — the only thing I told her before the game is that it’s loud and the section doesn’t sit down. She ended up loving being in that section as she got to yell as much and as loud as she wanted to.

We stayed for the majority of the game, but it was getting late and I was getting tired and we still had to drive back to Socorro.

As we were walking out of the stadium, Cathy told me how she can’t wait to go to another game.

We will probably watch the season finale of Ted Lasso this week as season two starts soon and plan another United adventure.

Caitie Ihrig