I’ll admit it: I’ve hit one of my periodic blogging funks. I’ve found it difficult to write over the past week.
I think most of that can be attributed to my sleep cycles getting all jacked up.* I’ll only say that I’ve been spoiling our youngest child at nap and bedtimes, and as a result I’m getting plenty of sleep, just at odd times.
(That is the proper medical term.)
So let’s bust out some quickies and hopefully that will prime the pump so I can complete a few of the longer posts I’ve put into the queue.
Speaking of L., we got her an official big girl bed this week. She had been sleeping on her crib mattress on the floor for almost a month. Costco finally got the twin mattress sets back in stock, so we upgraded her. She’s just on the mattress for now; we’ll save the box springs for later. She loves it! Well, at least she loves to climb onto it and yell “BED!” Sleeping is hit and miss, but we’re used to that. Today I asked her if it was her bed and she screamed “YEAH!” in a very Dave Chapelle doing Lil’ John voice. “WHAT?!”
As I mentioned, I received a smoker for Christmas. I took my first crack at a pork shoulder on Monday. I give myself a B. I didn’t have enough hickory, so I didn’t get the amount of smoke into the meat that I wanted. And I didn’t get it quite as tender as it should be. But I am grading on a curve; the high temperature was around 20 that day. The meat stalled out at around 140 in the smoker and I had to bring it inside to the crock pot to finish. It was good, there was just room for improvement. I was very pleased with my sauce, though. It was just something I found online but seems like a good base to do experimentation from.
Oh, so the other smokers know what kind of hardware I’m rocking, I have a Brinkman electric smoker. I know there are serious smokers who think electric is for losers, but I’m not sure I have time to hang out and monitor a fire for 12 hours. Maybe once I perfect the electric thing and all the girls are in school.
I was back to work tonight after three weeks off for the holidays. I covered perhaps the best team in the county against undoubtedly the worst. It was a 36-point win, and really not that close. The losers had 23 turnovers in the first half. The winners shot 79% in the second quarter. Their best player dropped 29 and had close to ten assists.* The winning coach is a super nice guy who is great to talk to. The losing coach has been coaching for years and it’s hard to ask him about yet another 30+ point loss. It’s not easy writing about a game that was effectively over two minutes after the opening tip.
(I don’t track assists. Someday I’ll write a super-meta post where I breakdown what all I do during a game I’m covering.)
As I texted by friend Billy the Poke, one of the girls had her shorts on backwards and had to flee to the locker room to turn them around. Unfortunately, there were no “Shorts on backwards!” chants.
So I’m filing my story around 10:00, and as the e-mail flies away, I notice a bunch of messages in my inbox referencing some strange goings-on at Allen Fieldhouse. What followed was ten minutes of frustration as I attempted to navigate a small, sleepy Indiana town in the dark while following the Yahoo play-by-play on my iPhone. Kids, don’t try this at home. Worse, Yahoo was having some serious issues. The score would change without any accounting of why. KU went from -1 to +4 and Yahoo only accounted for two of the points. I got worried that the score was wrong and it would suddenly show no time left and Cornell winning. That did not happen, thank goodness. But Yahoo does suck.
600+ words without too much effort. Perhaps that will get me back in the swing. I’m going to try to get some sleep now.
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