Quite the week-plus it has been. I was so busy in the lead-up to our spring break trip to Alabama that I left two in-progress posts behind when we left town on April 1. My apologies! As they were both time sensitive, they shall be filed away in my local archives in case they can be used sometime down the road. Anyway, we had an excellent week. A fortuitous week, as well.
Note: I began this Thursday morning but failed to post it. Please excuse my use of what appears to be the incorrect tense. Spring break is almost here. Today is the girls’ last day of school before vacation. I have a full day of laundry, errands, and packing ahead of me. So a few quick notes before I jump into all that. TV I did not watch season one of Fargo, but after hearing so many raves about it, I set the DVR to record season two.
To wrap up my Louisville weekend review, some notes about what else I did down there in my brief visit. My KC homie E$ flew into Indy Friday and we headed south around lunchtime Saturday. He had been to the ‘Ville many times so had a solid plan for how to spend our pregame hours. First, we dined at Mark’s Feed Store[1], an excellent name for an establishment that specializes in smoked meats.
This post-Louisville entry centers on one particular moment of my visit, and explains why I missed the first four minutes of the game on Saturday. I took my fancy camera to the ‘Ville. I got a few decent pictures with it, but each time we made a pit stop, I questioned whether I should leave it with the truck or keep lugging it around. It became problematic when we toured the Louisville Slugger factory and museum.
So yeah, the purpose of my weekend visit to Louisville ended up sucking quite a bit. That didn’t mean the whole weekend was a bust, though. There are quite a few stories to share, so I think I’ll split this up into two or even three posts to keep it manageable/readable. Let’s start with the game and KU going out of the tournament a week too early. It was insanely frustrating watching the game in person.
Sweet 16 day has arrived! I woke up with a little nervousness, but with a bigger feeling of excitement. As I always say, this is the best week of the tournament, and it is much easier for your mind to contemplate bigger scenarios when there are a maximum of four games left in your favorite team’s season. Of course, being excited makes me nervous, so I’m sure by approximately 9:00 eastern tonight, I’ll be a big ball of frazzled nerves, snapping at the kids and worrying about whether I’m sitting in the right spot on the couch, if I’m drinking the right beer, etc.
Last week C marched in the Indianapolis St. Patrick’s Day parade, as is custom for third graders at St. P’s. It was a fabulous day, especially compared to when M marched two years ago. It was bright and sunny, in the mid–50s when the parade began, and eased into the low 60s by the time it ended. Two years ago, it was maybe 30, with windchills much lower, and flurries blowing around.
Some first weekend of the NCAA tournament! There are no great surprises as we glance at the sixteen teams still standing. When Gonzaga and Syracuse are the lowest seeds still playing, you can’t really call them Cinderellas. But there was a lot of fun in getting to this point. First, my Jayhawks. A nearly perfect first weekend. Which means nothing going forward, other than they’re still playing. Which is something the last two KU teams could not say.
You know, for all this talk about how wide open this year is, I find myself agreeing with all the folks who are not going out on any limbs in picking their Final Four. I think a lot of that can be explained away rather easily: while there were no dominant teams in November, December, and January, in February and March a few teams did separate themselves from the pack.
For several years I’ve been trying to get M to read the Harry Potter series. She loves reading to begin with, and is especially fond of lengthy series, so it seemed like a perfect match. However, each time I recommended the books to her, she said she wasn’t interested. I would point out other kids her age, or even younger, who had read them, but she always said no. That finally changed a couple months back.
Yep, I’m frightened. Sure, there’s the normal fright that comes this time of year when you support a school that has been a top-four seed for nearly two decades and has a number of early flameouts over that span. There’s the hand-wringing that fans of every school go through when they begin breaking down the bracket, sure that their favorite team has an unfairly difficult path to get to the Final Four.
A pretty light edition this week. (Update: have a sick kid at home for the fourth time in two weeks, so was able to read/add a couple more articles while watching Scooby Doo and Despicable Me 2.) To begin, more love for Bill Self. I’m sharing these now since we’ll all be bashing him in a couple weeks when KU loses to a lower seed in the NCAA tournament.
open.spotify.com/user/224a… “The Boy In the Bubble” - Paul Simon. I acknowledge Simon’s place in music history, but his songs never really connected with me. They were my parents’ generation’s songs, not mine. This is the one exception. I’ve always loved it and crank it up any time I hear it, as I did earlier this week on SiriusXM’s The Spectrum station. “Pale Kings” - Shearwater. One of my three favorite songs of the year (so far).
We have a star in the family. My wife appeared on the local noon news yesterday in an Ask the Doc segment. Her topic was kids and sleep, one that was especially timely given the time change this weekend and the state reading test that all third graders begin on Monday.[1] It was a fairly quick three-minute appearance, but it was very much live and I think it’s ok for me to share that she was a little nervous.
Another productive month, even with a couple wrinkles thrown in. I had my first abandoned book of the year in February. Leif G.W. Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End has been on my To Read list for a few years now. Occasionally I would breeze by it at the library and take a look. But between its size (550+ pages) and its place as the first in a trilogy, I always moved on.
The college hoops lull has arrived, a brief pause before all the big conferences kick off their tournaments over the next 72 hours. An opportunity to reflect on the regular season and think about the real tournament that is just over a week away. In my case it’s a chance to begin working up a healthy case of nerves about KU’s chances to end their season in Houston. That’s an outcome that I figured had roughly zero chance of happening just over a month ago.
My Instapaper queue is crammed full of articles. Unfortunately for all of you, the bulk of them relate to a couple topics I’m really into now that won’t necessarily be that interesting to anyone else. So just a few things to share this week. This is really long, and really geeky, but here is a very detailed look at how the Millennium Falcon came to be. I admit I got about halfway through and just skimmed the rest while paying more attention to the really cool sketches and storyboard samples.
Spring is nigh. Sure, it snowed here today, and is expected to again on Saturday. But it is also supposed to jump into the 70s next week. Mornings and evenings are getting a little brighter each day as our daylight stretches out. Spring training baseball has begun. My anticipation of warmer days is like a little kid’s on December 10 counting down the days until Christmas. Also, love is in the air.
I’ve shared quite a bit about L’s first basketball season. C didn’t play a winter sport, but did go to a softball clinic Saturday and had a great time. She’s excited to play both softball and go through her first kickball season this spring. That leaves M, who is in her second year of volleyball. Unfortunately, we had a lot of conflicts between volleyball and basketball over the past month. And since I was coaching basketball, I only got to see M play in about half of her games.
It is that time of year again. No, not a birthday for one of my girls. Although it may as well be. Time for my annual “KU Won the Big 12 (Again)” post. Feel free to skip if you’re sick of these. I’ll probably end up repeating myself from the last 11 anyway. Twelve. Even I will admit that is dumb. It should not happen. It can not happen. This isn’t some hoops giant stuck in a league with a bunch of schools that consider basketball an afterthought.