SOCCER MAMASITA

If soccer’s your thing, and you’re interested in trying to win a trip to the World Cup in Germany this summer, here’s one to bookmark and enter daily through the end of the month.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been Googling my heart out looking for sweeps to this summer’s games. My son, who’s nine, plays on two soccer teams. They, and soccer in general, are pretty much his favorite things in the world these days, besides his assorted pets. While I’ve become a serious soccer aficionado, I am not fan of throng events, like the World Cup is going to be in spades. But I’d make this trip for my son, I’d make the sacrifice, just like I did when I bought him a snake for his eighth birthday.

I hate snakes. We’ve had not one but a total of three snakes since we got our first one, Dr. Hyde, in September 2004. Sadly, mysteriously, Dr. Hyde went missing, in our apartment, six months later. We waited to see if he’d come back – apparently they can live on their own for months, don’t ask me how -- but he never did. So we finally went and bought another snake. The day we got him, the same day, a Sunday last October, he disappeared, somewhere between the pet store and our apartment. We looked for him in the apartment, in the hall to the apartment, in the elevator, in the lobby, on the sidewalk, in the parking lot, in the car. No snake. We went back to the pet store and got another one, snake number three.

Four days later, we were driving to the pediatrician’s to see if my son had strep, and he starting screaming, “Mom. Mom. Mom.” The snake – Snake Number Two, the one that had gone missing the day we bought him -- had fallen from somewhere in the car’s, and was slithering around my son’s feet. Oh, so that’s where he’d been hiding. Now, this was a baby corn snake, a snake that’s not much larger than a large worm, but still. I was not a happy camper. However, since I am at the wheel of a Subaru Outback, I decide this is not the moment for a reptile-induced freakout. I pulled over, and implored my son to pick up the snake. He refused. Suddenly, my charming Mr. Snake Lover is afraid of snakes, too. I made a plan: We’d go to the 7-11 up the street, get a coffee cup and coax the snake back into captivity.

By the time we go there, the snake has disappeared again into the underbelly of the car. Like magic, he resurfaced minutes later. At that moment, my idea of a miracle is capturing the snake and not being late for the doctor's appointment. Since neither of us had the gumption to pick him up by hand, I used a little stick to prod the snake into the cup. Mission accomplished. We decided to bring the snake in to the pediatrician’s office with us, so this Harry Houdini of a snake would not escape again.

Now, we didn’t want anyone to know what was in our coffee cup, especially the couple in the waiting room with their newborn twins. So I just held the cup, and we did not discuss its contents and the sound it kept making each time it poked its head against the lid. As it turned out, my son did not have strep, no one in the doctor’s office figured out I had an exotic animal on my person, we returned the snake to his tank the moment we got home. For a few days, we were the proud caretakers of two baby corn snakes. A few days later, the other snake, Snake Number Three, died. He couldn’t keep his mice down. My son named the sole survivor, Snake Number Two, Ripley, for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

I sometimes can’t believe there is a snake in my life.

After all this snake drama, a few days of soccer throngs would be most manageable.

This sweeps is on Coca-Cola. The prize includes tickets to see the Mexican National Team play either Iran, Angola or Portugal. (Why Mexico and not the U.S.? This sweeps is aimed at the Hispanic market, that’s why. When it comes to sweeps, winners can’t be chosers.) Accommodations are in a three-star hotel. Not ideal, but as long as there are no snakes on the premises, I should be fine.


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WORLD CUP IN GERMANY, 2 NIGHTS AND AIR

DEADLINE: April 30, 2006
TO ENTER, CLICK HERE.
SPONSOR: Coca-Cola
THE DIGS: TBD
ARV (APPROXIMATE RETAIL VALUE): $7,940
MY PERSONAL ENTRY: April 6, 2006
OF NOTE: You have to register for Coke Rewards. It’s painless. The Official Rules explain how you can enter by phone and text message, a first for this sweepstress.
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