I feel strange today. I pinballed between football games, half-heartedly, not really caring what happened or able to settle on a single game. Why? For the first time in 13 weeks, I’m not worrying about a KU score. It’s weird; I feel naked without the jacket that has kept me warm all fall. Add in the fact I’m still struggling to accept that basketball season has started, and KU has a rather large game tomorrow, and I’m sure something is wrong with me.
I knew the questions might come when I posted the picture of our Christmas tree. And since a few people have inquired, I should go ahead and end the suspense for anyone else who is wondering: No, S. is not pregnant. Some of you have noticed that we have five stockings hung, and with only four people living in the house, it makes sense to wonder if something is in the oven.
Well, that was disappointing. I’m starting to put together these thoughts at about 2:45 on Sunday afternoon, and suffering from a massive headache. I’m not sure if that’s from the beer I drank last night, my contacts/glasses giving me problems, or from dealing with the girls alone all week. Hopefully it won’t interfere with putting together some relatively clear thoughts. First, it must be said that Missouri was much better than KU on both sides of the ball last night.
Here we go. The Biggest Game Ever is only about 30 hours away and I admit the stomach is starting to churn a bit. Before we get to the game, I wanted to share how much I’ve enjoyed the conversations I’ve had with people from both sides of the rivalry this week. To be fair, it’s not like my extended group of friends is full of a-holes who treat their friends like shit on game day.
Everyone Go Crazy And Act Like A Fool</span> week has arrived. The best-case scenario most people scoffed at six weeks ago has become reality. Tigers and Jayhawks congregating in Arrowhead on Saturday to play for a lot more than bragging rights. If KU can continue it’s run, they are just two games from playing for a national title. In football. Consider that again. Ridiculous, right? If MU wins, they probably get a second shot at a wounded OU team they hung with in October, brimming with confidence and with their own less direct but equally real path to the BCS championship game awaiting.
Don’t worry, the weekly football post will come. This late Saturday Big 12 game, though, is making it even harder to rationally think about the next seven days. Dominos falling… In an amazing coincidence, C. said both her name and her sister’s name for the first time today. She said “C.” to me several times this morning, although she would point at me and laugh when she said it. She picked it up again in the evening, so we asked her if she could say M.
Another full weekend of football. First, as I may have mentioned and the pic above will show, we trekked up north to attend the Notre Dame - Air Force game. A good friend from KC has a friend rather high up in the administration at the Academy, and came to town for the weekend with access to some pretty good tickets. When I say pretty good I mean really freaking good.
For the first time in her life, M. threw up today.* Appropriately, C. was laughing the entire time her big sister was puking up her dinner. I say appropriately, because the last time C. was sick, M. laughed. The fact it took M. over three years to throw up something other than formula bodes well for her college years, at least vis-a-vis her old man’s experience. For my non-parenting friends, I make a distinction between puking up your food and babies spitting up.
We took advantage of M. being at preschool and C. not commanding the language well enough to share secrets to take our youngest one along with us today to Toys R Us to scout out the hottest toys for the holiday season. Place was packed. I’m not sure if it was people using their two hour window for voting to actually get a jump on Christmas shopping or maybe Tuesdays are always a busy day, but it was strange to find the place hopping at noon.
The calendar has flipped to November, baseball has ended (only 14 weeks until pitchers and catchers report!), the furnace is on, and there is frost on the grass. All sure signs that football will rule my TV for the next couple months. Three games will hold most of my attention this weekend. Some thoughts below. Game One: Manchester United at Arsenal, 8:45 AM EDT Saturday. When I say football, I mean all kinds of football.
M. was very excited for Halloween. We got the girls' costumes about a month ago, and anytime we mentioned Halloween, M. would shout, “I’m going to be a GOOD witch!” Clarifying the good part was very important. She was literally shaking with anticipation last night, when we finally put the costume on and prepared to hit the streets. When other kids would come to the door, she would try to help give them candy, but would get a little too wound up and would just shout, “Happy Halloween!
I didn’t get this going until late in the game, but some baseball thoughts, wrapped around the last three innings of the Indians - Red Sox battle. Games sevens rock. And this has been a fine one, full of momentum swings, close calls, blunders, and clutch plays. In the first third, it looked like the Red Sox would run away and hide. In the middle third, it seemed like the Sox couldn’t touch Jake Westbrook and it was only a matter of time before the Indians took the lead.
It’s been awhile since I gave you a full update on the girls. C. is full of new tricks. She learned, last week, how to remove her own shirt. I was sitting here in the office one day when she came walking in, sans shirt, with a big smile on her face, smacking her bare belly with her hands. I got the process on video the next day, but can’t get the video across from the camera for some reason.
The Colorado Rockies are in the World Series? Seriously? I must admit, I never thought I’d see that happen. To be honest, I didn’t actually <em>see</em> much of it, thanks to those 10 PM eastern starts. I caught a few innings here-and-there either at the beginning of games, or on the nights when my cough kept me awake and I went downstairs for awhile. It’s a shame most of the country has missed their run, because it is one of the most remarkable runs in sports, ever.
As if you needed proof I’m a bit off, one of my favorite things is to check out </span><span style=“font-family:Helvetica Neue;"><em>The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits</em></span><span style=“font-family:Helvetica Neue;"> from the library and then just flip through the pages, soaking up the trivia. I recently checked it out again and figured I would put it to some kind of use. Thus, I scribbled some notes about one hit wonders as well as bands/artists you might think were one hit wonders but in fact were not.
Of course, I must gush about my 5-0 Jayhawks. I hold no grudge against those who withheld judgement until KU “played somebody.” That was certainly fair. In fact, I was doing it myself, although I remained cautiously optimistic going into Saturday’s game at K-State. I just had no idea how we would match-up with a team that just waxed Texas in Austin after four weeks of cream-filled pastries. So the game was on here, which was fun.
I must admit, this is a terrifically difficult album for me to write about. First, a ton has already been written about it, and I always fear that I’m simply regurgitating things I’ve read elsewhere. Second, I find myself attempting to “solve” the album each time I listen to it. It’s a bit like The Wall, in that sense. As I’ve had it on heavy rotation over the past two weeks, I have to catch myself from over-analyzing what a drum roll here, a sigh there, or an oddly placed noise is symbolic of.
I’m not sure what happened to this week. Seriously, it seems like it was just Sunday night and I had grand plans for a bunch of blog posts, a bunch of projects around the house, and so on, and here I am on Friday having accomplished little if any of that. That’s what a cold going through the house will do, I guess. So, hopefully lots to come next week. Favorite album #2 will be posted for sure.
“You’re quite hostile.” “I got a right to be hostile, man, my people been persecuted.” I said in my initial list that this is the most influential album in my life. Before we get to that, first a quick review of how this album fit into the history of rap. When it was released in 1988, rap had already entered the mainstream and was beginning to become a cultural force. That said, most rap was tame, slightly silly, and reminiscent of early rock & roll: fun to listen to but not terribly thought provoking (To be fair, there were many important early songs in rap that had a social context).
So how’d it go? Not bad. I’m fighting heartburn and indigestion today because I found out, after publication of course, that I made a minor but glaring error in my story. The kind of error that I glanced right over but a reader caught right away. Ugh. But it was kind of cool to go down to the RCA Dome and cover a game as a working member of the media.