Day: July 21, 2025

Once again this weekend notes piece will involve more than what went on from Friday to Sunday. I’ll start with a focus on the actual weekend, though.

WNBA All Star Game

The best players in the league were all in Indy over the weekend for Saturday’s All Star Game. While that was exciting, it was tempered a bit by Caitlin Clark getting injured again Tuesday and not participating in either the 3-point contest Friday or playing in the All Star Game Saturday. She did “coach” her team, though.

The biggest point of this section is that L got to go to the game. And not only was she in Gainbridge, but she had amazing seats. The dad of one of her best friends runs the business that puts the gigantic decals on all the buildings around downtown for whatever the latest event is.

Because of that he has tickets to pretty much every game. L has been their guest at Gainbridge before, for the Big 10 tournament last March, and assumed she would be sitting in the suite again. Apparently the suite was reserved for VIPs so the girls had to slum it in the sixth row.

Pretty cool.

She had a good time. She and her friends were close enough that the mascots all kept coming over and harassing them. They were sitting near all kinds of famous people. They got to meet and take a pic with WNBA player Nika Mühl. She dropped $112 on a Paige Bueckers jersey. I told her I really hope CHS has multiple jersey days this year so she can actually wear it.

The game itself was ok. They introduced a fun wrinkle by having four-point spots behind the 3-point arc. Which, in theory, was cool. But it turned out both teams just kept chucking from that point. Team Collier was hitting them while Team Clark was not, and that was the difference.

I think a good tweak for next year is to make those only count for four points in the last two minutes of each quarter or something. Not that the ASG will ever be real ball – Clark told her team not to even bother with defense and just chuck all night – but watching 25 foot shot after 25 foot shot got a bit tedious.

It being the WNBA, naturally there was a manufactured controversy. The players came out before the game wearing shirts that said “Pay Us What You Owe Us,” referring to their current CBA negotiations with the league. The usual crowd who never watched a WNBA game before Clark was drafted piped up and criticized the move. God forbid workers stand up for their rights and to be paid their fair share of the massive amount of money the league is now bringing in. Especially when the workers are all women, mostly Black, and many of them queer.

Never a dull moment.

Tour de France

I had been enjoying the Tour de France each morning until this weekend. Defending champ Tadej Pogacar came in as the heavy favorite, but there was hope that two-time champ Jonas Vingegaard could put pressure on him. The two were sitting in second and third places, separated by a minute, when the race finally entered the mountains on Thursday. And Pogacar promptly destroyed everyone. Vingegaard himself finished well ahead of everyone else, but at the end of the stage was over four minutes behind Pogacar in the general classification. The only hope for an exciting final week is that Pogacar has some kind of major illness or accident. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m not rooting for that at all.

I’ll still watch this week, but it will likely be with far less attention that I gave the race the first 10 days.

British Open

Speaking of dominating performances, Scottie Scheffler solidified his position as best golfer in the game with a relatively easy win at Royal Portrush. He makes it look so easy that the comparisons to Tiger Woods in his prime have started. I’m not sure those are fair or accurate. Scheffler doesn’t blow away the course the way young Tiger did. But he does have a clinical, unperturbed style that is reminiscent of Tiger’s second peak.

He also is far less single-minded and weird about winning that Tiger was. Scheffler has always said how he doesn’t get too worked up about failing on the golf course because he is a very religious man and believes there are bigger things to worry about. Last Tuesday he admitted he doesn’t burn to be the best, nor is his goal to be a role model for others as a golfer.

I usually bristle when athletes bring religion into the conversation when explaining their success, mostly because is it often framed as God being on their side somehow. Which the heathen me has always taken to the next logical step that God must have not been on the opponent’s side, then, right? And I refuse to believe whatever higher power there might be has any interest in who wins a stupid game.

But Scheffler has never been an evangelist when he talks about his faith. He talks about his personal experience, and suggests that faith frees his mind rather than gives him some kind of boost over his opponents. Which I totally respect. And I admire that Scheffler seems a lot more normal than most high level athletes who are so wired to win or motivated by slights that they turn into psychopaths.

One thing that really drove me nuts about NBC were the incessant ads for their upcoming NBA coverage, featuring a variety of NBC personalities singing or humming along to John Tesh’s famous “Roundball Rock” theme. I get that networks always celebrate when they re-gain rights to sports they used to have. But Fox Sports bought “Roundball Rock” a few years back and used it for their college basketball coverage. It’s not like it was buried and you could only hear it on grainy rips of old VHS tapes on YouTube.

I might have been ok with the ads if they didn’t run them during EVERY commercial break. And they’ve also been running them during Peacock’s Tour de France coverage. So I’ve seen them a million times this month.

House Stuff

As mentioned last week, I had two visits from contractors. One planned, one unplanned.

Tuesday morning I went to the basement to grab some chlorine tabs for the pool and noticed wet concrete under our water heater. Uh oh. We’ve been in the house seven years, which means it was probably installed 7.5 years ago, which is right in line with when traditional heaters can begin to fail.

I noticed the water was all coming from the top of the tank, not the bottom, so I was hopeful maybe it was just a leak.

I had a service come out and they confirmed that tanks can rust out from the top as easily as the bottom. So we needed a new one. Terrific. Water heaters ain’t cheap, friends.

I called early enough that we were able to get a new one installed before the day was over. We still had hot water until the crew showed up so everyone was able to get a shower in before they removed the old one, and then I could wash dishes normally after dinner.

You think stuff is going to last forever, especially when you buy a new house. It is a little shocking that we’ve been here long enough that some of the original parts are beginning to fail.

The planned visit was on Thursday. Without writing a million words about it, I’ve been wanting to jump from Xfinity for cable and internet for a while, for a variety of reasons. But they are the only service in our neighborhood. I even looked into various satellite options but those are all much, much slower than what Xfinity provides.

Last December, though, Metronet ran fiber through our neighborhood, including right through our yard. Some dudes were out digging holes and running the lines on the coldest week of that month.

I discounted Metronet because their line is on the north side of our house. Our Xfinity line comes in from the south side and feeds into our basement where our network box is. To get from the north side to south side of our house, you would have to run several hundred feet of line and either go under our driveway or find a way to go around our pool without hitting anything. I didn’t want to mess with that so figured it wasn’t an option.

It only took me seven months to realize I’m an idiot and they could absolutely run a line to the north side of our house. Like, literally, I am such a dumbass.

I scheduled them to come out on Thursday. The guy showed up and said it would take probably two hours to get everything installed.

Sweet.

Again without going too deep into it, a two hour job turned into five. We are apparently the first people to sign up for service since they ran the line, so the poor guy had to drag his ladder all over our neighborhood and climb utility poles to connect the overhead lines to the underground ones. The heat index was 95° while he was doing this. We only had small bottles of water so I gave him a cooler that was filled with 10 of them, and he finished every one.

Once our new network was running and stable, I signed up for YouTube TV, which I’ve wanted for some time. The first two months, while we have a series of discounts, we will pay close to $200 less per month for the same internet speed and basically the same TV offerings. Even when the discounts go away, it will be over $100 difference. And we were about to have some Xfinity discounts expire so that was going to go up anyway.

Through the first weekend I’m pleased with Metronet. They use Eero boxes for internet, and with just two we seem to have better internet throughout the house than the three Xfinity boxes gave us. YouTube TV took a minute to get used to, but I like it so far. I’m looking forward to fall sports season when I can use the multiview to watch four games at once. I will have to pay to get Pacers games, and the app they used last year had all the usual issues those services are known for.

Other than fighting with a couple of our TVs for a few hours to get everything set up, it’s been a pretty easy process[1]. But I wasn’t the one climbing utility poles in the heat.

The installer said someone would be out in the next two weeks to bury our line. I put up a bunch of flags and stakes and ran out to warn our lawn guys about it when it showed up. Hopefully whoever shows up to take care of the line doesn’t take four months like Xfinity did when they installed our line in 2018.