Siamo i vincitori!!!

The Broken Grandpas has won their first game! Ever!

The Grandpas

Alessio in action

Now is it perhaps too much credit for me (F) to take credit for the victory? Perhaps, but I did get to start as right guard on offence and caught a pass during our first touchdown drive as well as swatting the ball out of the opposing quarterback's hands on their final play in overtime--draw your own conclusions...

Fabio had a fantastic game!

And clearly gave it 100%

Massimo about to make a reception

Now to be fair, the Orange Donkeys only showed up with five players and had to have the referee play center. And even though they were half our ages, they were also half our sizes too. So props to them for coming back from a 12-0 deficit at halftime and forcing sudden death overtime. Our main issue in the second half was our backup center launching the ball repeatedly over the quarterback's head. We've got a few things to iron out before we take on the heavy hitters of the FFL (Friendly Football League)--the Battlecats, AC/DC, or the Thunderknights.

Some hair-pulling going on on the left and our capo, Gianluca, on the right

On a different subject, yesterday I spent close to two hours waiting in line for the Polizia Municipale to register our bikes for targhe (literally license plates, but in this case, little metallic adhesive stickers.)

In typical Italian syle, there were 16 or so police officers in their dress uniforms, but only two of them were actually processing the information into the computers. I waited alongside Stefania from the restaurant downstairs and we had a nice chat in which I learned that she's actually from Milan and she met her husband Salvatore one year when she came to Lucca for Lucca Comics and he was the cute waiter in the restaurant where she had lunch every day. She also told me that their website that I designed is getting them lots of reservations, so they are totally happy.

When I finally got to the front of the line, the nice police officer who explained to me in great detail all the details of the tag program that might well have been explained to us all as a group during the almost two hours we were waiting in line looked at one of our sad bikes and asked why it had no seat--opening herself up for the inevitable answer, "Because they stole it!"

Stefania and the giant chocolate monster

So today when I got back from playing football and got back on my bike I looked down and--you guessed it--someone stole the targa off the bike, leaving a little metallic trace that says "Void Void Void..."