Holiday Weekend Notes

Thanksgiving week 2025 is in the books. It was mostly good. Other than me thinking Friday was Saturday all day. Lots happened, so here’s a lengthy breakdown to wade through as you ease back into your routines.

Thanksgiving

We hosted this year, only having 15. We could fit everyone at one (big) table!

I feel like I have the food portion of hosting down. I know how to make a decent turkey. I have a couple go-to recipes for sides that have never failed. Everyone has an off year, though, and this was mine.

First, the turkey was just ok. Not sure why, or if maybe it’s just because I don’t like turkey as much as I used to, but it seemed kind of mid to me.

Second, I messed up my mashed potatoes. As we were eating them I noticed something was off, but couldn’t place it. Later I realized that in my late rush to get everything done, I had failed to double the fats/liquids to match the doubled quantity of potatoes. Idiot. I’ve only been making them this way for a decade or so, and always double the recipe.

Third, I’ve been making Giada De Laurentiis’ holiday dressing for over two decades now, and it always pleases. The catch is her recipe calls for chestnuts. In the early days of preparing it, I was never able to find them. So I freelanced, subbing in water chestnuts instead. Which is weird, I admit, because water chestnuts and roasted chestnuts have nothing in common. But it worked so I stuck with it.

This year, though, I actually found roasted chestnuts at Costco! I’ve never had them so had no idea what to expect. I was a little repulsed when I popped one into my mouth and they were mushy rather than crunchy. They added nothing to the dressing. I’ll go back to water chestnuts next year.

Food issues aside, it was a nice day with our smaller-than-normal group. The football was good, too.

We slowly got the Christmas decorations up over the weekend, working in waves. We watched Elf Thanksgiving night, part of Christmas Vacation on Sunday. On my drive Sunday evening – more on that next – I finally busted out some Christmas music.

Weekend Traveller

C flew to Atlanta on Friday to visit a high school friend that goes to Auburn. “Pretty cool!” you might say to yourself. “Going to Auburn the weekend of the Iron Bowl sounds amazing!”

Well, she had a good time but it had little to do with the game. They did not have tickets, everything in town was overpriced because of the game so they didn’t get out much, and the weather was chilly, for the south, so they didn’t even go explore campus. Not how I would have spent a weekend in an SEC city but that’s me.

Other than being delayed about an hour getting out of Atlanta Sunday evening, travel went well. This was her first time traveling alone, or without us rather, and while we were checking in often, she did a good job arranging for a ride back to the airport on Sunday, getting through the airport, etc.

Well, there was one issue. Another friend of theirs was flying down with C. He got dropped off at our house Friday morning and I was taking the pair to the airport. On his way here he texted C and told her that he had left his ID in his dorm in Cincinnati. Oh boy. He arrived at our house with a fist full of documents to prove his identity. He even had a photo of his driver’s license, so we printed that off quickly.

Fortunately other than it taking a lot longer for him to get through security as they asked him a bunch of questions and gave his bag extra scrutiny, he got through TSA checkpoints in both Indy and Atlanta.

It’s a good thing he’s a nice kid otherwise we might have killed him.

I met C at the airport Sunday night and drove her back to Bloomington. She has two more full weeks of class before finals begin.

High School Hoops

Two games last week, Wednesday and Saturday. On Wednesday JV got their first win of the year. L scored the first bucket of the game but those were her only points. Varsity gave up just 28 points…but only scored 22. A truly brutal game to watch, nearly as bad as some of those 80 missed shots, 60 turnover games I covered back in the day.

Saturday we flipped it, varsity winning by three, JV losing by three. L scored five points in the JV game, all as we were coming from 12 down in the fourth quarter. She got pissed off by two terrible calls and played much better after. I told her she needs to find something to piss her off before the games because she clearly plays better then.

Varsity is 3–4, JV 1–6. Two more games this week.

KU Hoops

An unexpectedly good week for the Jayhawks, who won three games in Las Vegas without Darryn Peterson and after losing Jayden Dawson before the opening game. Every day a different player stepped up. Flory Bidunga destroyed Notre Dame. Melvin Council Jr. was great against Syracuse. And, out of nowhere, Elmarko Jackson was massive against Tennessee. Tre White was good all week. Bryson Tiller was solid in each game. I missed the Tennessee game, but happily followed the score from a high school gym as KU erased a 12-point deficit and eeked out the win. We’ll see who is cleared to play for tomorrow night’s game with UConn…

A great week, as the team is figuring out how to play without Peterson. They might be solid defensively. Bidunga and Tiller are developing some nice chemistry. Once Peterson is fully healthy, that takes the pressure off him needing to score 20+ every night. Word was he spent a lot of his summer working on parts of his game that have nothing to do with scoring, as NBA scouts wanted to see how he could move the ball. A perfect situation for him to come back to, learning to trust the teammates around him.

KU Football

How very KU Football to tease us by hanging with #14 Utah all day Friday, even holding a lead early in the fourth quarter, then absolutely falling apart thanks to some horrific decisions by Jalon Daniels. The fourth game this year KU has led in the fourth quarter but failed to win.

A terrible way to end his career, but it also neatly summed it up. After throwing just four interceptions all season, he threw three Saturday. The first snuffed out a good drive deep in Utah territory. The second was perhaps the worst decision/throw of his career,[1] and was picked off in the end zone. The final one turned into a 97-yard pick six when he hit a defender in the numbers. There was also a play late in the third quarter when he threw behind a receiver instead of in front of him on a fourth down play. Put it in front, it is at least a catch and first down in the red zone, maybe a touchdown. Instead it was a turnover on downs.

Jalon helped turn the program around, so deserves credit and thanks for that. He won at Texas. Played one of the best individual games in school history against Arkansas. He put them in position to make two bowl games. But KU has also tread water the past two years, and his uneven play was one of the biggest causes. He deserves slack for coming back from so many injuries and never being the same athlete he was before TCU broke his back three seasons ago. But, damn, get better at the other things like decision making to make up for your limitations.

Now comes the worst part of the year, waiting to see what young players will enter the portal when it opens. Some of which may be dependent on if there are any changes to the coaching staff. The expectation is there will be at least one major change, perhaps a coordinator or two leaving.

Next year becomes massive for whether Lance Leipold has a long future at KU. He’s recruited decently, but not many of his high school recruits have turned into solid contributors. His portal success has been decidedly mixed, with some really good additions balanced by others who barely played. He needs to get some guys who can get on the field and make an impact immediately.

Babysitting

Friday M watched a four-month-old baby at our house. Baby F is a sweet little thing, not fazed by strangers at all. L was very excited to see her as she is the granddaughter of L’s godparents. They sat together on the couch and played for a full hour after her evening bottle. M and F were napping on the couch next to me during the KU game. Which meant I was silently screaming and pulling at my hair as the Jayhawks fell apart.

Weather

Our first big winter storm of the season came through Saturday evening. Saturday morning the weather folks were saying 2–4” here. We didn’t even get that, my guess is just under two inches of heavy, wet snow that mostly fell while we were at basketball. I went out late and pushed it all off the driveway to keep it from turning into a sheet of ice when the temps crashed overnight. Now it is going to be numbingly cold all week with a couple chances of snow. I do not like true winter weather.

Colts

Uh oh.

Daniel Jones is apparently playing with a broken leg. Sauce Gardner at a minimum severely strained his calf early in Sunday’s game against Houston, at worst destroyed his achilles. Three brutal calls went against the Colts late Sunday, helping seal the Texans’ victory. OK, two brutal calls and one extremely strange call.

Now all the margin the Colts built up over the first half of the season is gone. They will travel to Jacksonville next week tied with the Jaguars for first place. A loss could drop them to third place depending on Houston’s game against the Chiefs. Every game left on their schedule is against a team with a winning record. It might be time to panic.

Oh, and remember the Colts traded next year’s first round pick – and another first round pick – for Gardner. Cursed franchise.

Replay

I get more adamant every week that we need to either get rid of replay review or dramatically curtail its usage.

Two examples from Sunday. In the Colts game, referees missed a clear face mask on the Colts’ final drive of the game. But face mask calls cannot be challenged and are not automatically reviewed, so the Colts were screwed.

However, in a game later (Buffalo-Pittsburgh maybe?) a face mask was called on the field but an automatic review said it was an incorrect call and overruled it.

Then in the night game, there was an automatic review that ruled a player was down by contact. But, by rule, that auto review could not throw a flag for the illegal trip that caused the runner to be down.

None of that makes any sense. You can overrule one kind of face mask call but not the other. And you can overrule a call to say a runner was down, but not acknowledge he was down because of a foul by the defense.

And why the fuck are there automatic reviews at all?

If the goal of replay is to get missed and incorrect calls right, it clearly fails if not applied evenly. Burn the whole system down and start over.[2]

(This is also the moment to mention there was a massive replay moment in the Michigan-Ohio State game Saturday that really should have taken away an OSU touchdown but the refs didn’t have the balls to make the call. That said, it was a call you could never make with the naked eye. This is the shit we need to eliminate.)

Lane Kiffin

This is long enough so I won’t go too deep here. But only Lane Kiffin could turn getting a job that will pay him something like $12 million per year into an opportunity to make himself the victim. Man spent 10 years rebuilding his reputation and pissed it all away in a week.