The Dow Is Up!

Holy Shnikeys! Did you see that Bears game last night? Is it possible for one game to be both the worst and the best Bears game I’ve ever seen? The first two and a half hours were simply painful. The last half hour was a complete turnaround. It was great enough to make me forget the earlier misery. The only comparison I can think of is if you went out drinking with me for 3 hours. You get stuck listening to me babble on and on for 2.5 hours about how cool actuaries are. Then some hot chick (or dude, if that’s your persuasion) walks up, punches me in the nose, and takes you home for a night of fantastic sex.

The Wife and I started watching the game and it was a disaster. (Which makes me think that The Wife is to blame since she was actually watching it. Truth is, she’s to blame because she dressed Luke in his Bears outfit on SUNDAY! How dare she not know that the Bears were playing on Monday night. Unacceptable! So when The Wife went to bed, I woke up Luke and put on his Bears outfit. And they came back and won the game. Coincidence? I think not.)

Anyway, we had a hard time watching the game. And not just because Luke was still awake. No, we had a hard time because we couldn’t follow what was going on. I’m not a huge fan of Monday Night Football. And yesterday, I finally figured out why. It’s because MNF isn’t about football. It’s about entertainment. They’re so worried about diminishing ratings that they’re literally throwing everything at you (duck!), hoping you’ll find something entertaining. But the problem is that it’s all too much. You have three dopes in the booth who can’t help but talk over each other. More importantly, they talk about esoteric things like “momentum” instead of telling us about how Rex Grossman got intercepted because he didn’t check down his receivers.

“The Bears have the momentum back after forcing that field goal try. Interception! Now the Cardinals have the momentum. I hope the momentum of the momentum shifts doesn’t get out of control. Fumble! Momentumble!” Just shoot me.

To make matters worse, for the entire second quarter (or what seemed like it), they had Charles Barkley in the booth. Yes, Charles Barkley. The BASKETBALL player. With absolutely nothing to promote. So what do they talk to him about? How hard it is to get momentum. In basketball. Then they go on to compare basketball and football. “Isn’t there a lot of contact in basketball in the paint?” “Um, not like football.” Hey, morons. It’s two completely different games. Why not bring in an Olympic badminton champion. Or the Iditarod winner. “How hard is it to get the sled dogs to understand the concept of momentum?”

So for an entire quarter of football, we got four morons in the booth talking about everything but what was happening on the field. And that’s when I realized that MNF has completely screwed everything up. And I blame Howard Cosell. When he first started announcing games on MNF, people would tune in to hear what Howard had to say. He was nuts. He was unpredictable. He single-handedly made the games interesting.

But that was 20 years ago. It’s a completely different landscape in football today. We don’t need announcers to entertain us because the game itself is so much more entertaining. (Well, not if you’re watching the Browns visit the Raiders. But for the most part.) And the best games to watch are the ones where the announcers are informing you instead of “entertaining” you. That’s why I enjoy watching Troy Aikman or Moose Johnston. They actually know what they’re talking about. They give you insight into the game. They actually add something to the game. And one of the ways they do it is by shutting the hell up every once in awhile. Football doesn’t have to be a blab fest.

I like to think of myself as a liberal and progressive person. There’s a black woman who sits near me at work. On the shelf above her computer is a wedding picture. Of two white people. For the first few weeks I worked here, I wracked my brain trying to come up with a reason why this black woman would have a wedding picture of two white people. And this is where my liberalism and progressivism (it’s a word, trust me) comes in.

I start making up stories in my head about how she came to have this picture. I’m thinking that maybe she’s part of a multi-racial family. Or maybe one of her parents re-married and now she has white step-siblings. Or maybe it was her college roommate. Or her best friend growing up. Just because *I* didn’t know any black people growing up (seriously, there were only 4 in my high school), it doesn’t mean that other people don’t. This is America after all. It’s the great melting pot. Black people SHOULD have white friends. In fact, I started mentally applauding this woman, not only for having white friends (or family members), but for having a picture of this white person getting married showing prominently at her desk. Good for her. Good for society. Good for everyone. Good for me.

So today, I found out that this black woman was just borrowing the desk. The real “owner” of the desk was out on maternity leave. She came back today. She’s white. It’s her wedding picture. D’oh.

We had a relatively productive weekend at the old family homestead this weekend. In a rare turn of events, we were both home all weekend. There were no trips to Wisconsin, no bachelor weekends, no trips out of town, no play dates for Luke. Just all three of us at home. (Of course, I went out to play some poker Saturday night, but that doesn’t count. Especially since I only won $2. How on earth do you play for 5 hours and only win $2? God, I suck at poker sometimes. More on that later.)

With all this time together, we had some outrageous fun. First, we all woke up early on Saturday and worked on the house! Okay, maybe that wasn’t a whole lot of fun. I’m talking about the waking up early part, of course. Yeah, Luke refuses to sleep in. Ever. I blame The Wife. (That’s a continuing theme in our relationship. I blame her for everything. In fact, I think she’s the one that sent OJ over the edge years ago. I think she started talking to him about working on the flower beds in our yard. “I’m thinking of cutting down a bush in the bed next to the garage.” “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to kill somebody!” “Then I’m going to move the violet bulbs to the bed next to the house and....” “AAAAAAH!!!!”)

Where was I? Oh yes, Luke woke up early. I seriously do blame The Wife for this. Mostly because she used to work in a plant and so she was up at ridiculous hours. Since she liked seeing her son in the morning (and who wouldn’t?), she made his schedule such that he was up early. (My schedule actually helped this out a bit, but let’s not talk about that right now.) So now Luke’s been getting up early every day for over a year. It’s ingrained. And I’m not happy about it. Hopefully, we can slowly adjust it so that he doesn’t start waking up until like 10:00. That would be perfect.

Anyway, after Luke woke up and we all putzed around a bit, The Wife and I started tiling our bathroom shower. You might be familiar with stories about our master bathroom remodeling project. We’ve been working on it for approximately 2 years. (No joke. The Wife started demolishing it before Luke was born. He’s nearing 2 years old now.) We’re nearing the end. All we’ve got to do is tile the shower and install the shower doors. (Of course, I’m neglecting the minor details like caulking and painting and whatnot.) So, Saturday morning, The Wife and I tiled one wall of the bathroom. Surprisingly, it went pretty well.

The way I measure success on a project, though, is not how it looks at the end. It’s whether or not The Wife or I (a) got injured or (b) got into a fight. Since neither happened, it was a success. The Wife and I tend to either work GREAT together or want to stab each other. This can be a problem when you’re working with sharp tools. (By the way, if you’re ever reading my obituary and it says that I fell onto a screwdriver while working on a project with The Wife, call the cops. Sure, I’m a clutz, but I also have a penchant for pissing off The Wife.) Anyway, the project went well because we were both so excited about how the shower wall looked. The fact that it didn’t look like backer board (which it has for about 6 months now) was a major plus.

After we worked on the bathroom, I decided to cut the grass. Given the recent weather (and the season), there were about a billion leaves in our front yard. I hate raking. With a passion. This might have something to do with my childhood. Our yard was HUGE. And we had plenty of trees. By my count, I’d say we had about 10 mature, deciduous trees. And so every year, we had to rake our yard and it was enough to drive a boy crazy. To make matters worse, for a long time we had to bag the leaves. I remember one weekend, we filled over 80 garbage bags full of leaves. And believe me, that wasn’t the only weekend we raked that year. Anyway, I raked leaves the first year we were in our new house and I wasn’t a fan. So last year, I used the lawn mower (with bagger) to pick up the leaves. It works much better. I just forgot how long it takes.

Saturday, it took me 2.5 hours to get the whole lawn cut and bagged. (It usually takes about 1.5 hours to cut the whole thing.) It was very long and tedious (kind of like my stories) because I had to stop every 100 feet to empty the bag. The most aggravating part? When I looked up and saw how many leaves were left in our trees. In fact, only one of our trees really lost any leaves. So, I’ve got many more hours of lawn cutting ahead of me. Which is nice. God, I can’t wait until Luke and C2 are old enough to do this.

Despite being totally exhausted, I decided to head into the city to play cards. One of the joys of living in the Chicagoland area is the open toll movement that’s going on now. I use “movement” in the most ironic form possible. You see, the idea is that having to stop every 5 miles to pay a toll is a bad thing. So instead of getting rid of tolls, they decided to reengineer, redesign, and rebuild every highway around Chicago. Fun! The idea is that people with an I-Pass can just zip right through the unmanned toll lanes. Chumps who don’t have an I-Pass have to exit the highway and pay DOUBLE the toll before they can get back on the highway.

So here’s the situation on Saturday night. I’m heading into the city from my distant suburb at 6:45. Traffic is STOPPED about 10 miles away from the toll. It takes me AN HOUR to get to the toll. During the construction phase, they have 2 lanes of traffic going through the I-Pass lane and 1 lane that has to exit to pay the toll manually. Do you have any idea how many people have to pay the toll manually on a Saturday night? Just about everyone. Know why? Cuz the people who go into the city on a Saturday night are suburban kids (high school, college, maybe even a little out of college). And what do suburban kids need an I-Pass for? So, there are about a million cars trying to go through the manual lanes. And that slows everything down. It was just an absolute nightmare. And since I’m bringing the table and poker chips, there’s no poker to be played until I show up and hour-and-a-half late for the game.

After I showed up, we got the game started. There were two kinds of players there that are always interesting to play with: the first-time player and the crazy-game player. I hate playing with first-timers. Not because you have to explain things or because they slow down the game. No, I hate them because they always seem to win. They stay in on hands they should have folded and end up catching a miracle straight to win. Only they don’t even know they have a straight. So then you have to explain to them how they managed to win $10 from you, preferably without strangling him in the process. It’s not easy.

The crazy-game players can be interesting. They always want to play something odd (usually Guts, or some derivation thereof). A lot of times, they want to play a different game every time it comes around to them. If you play long enough, they start getting desperate. “Um, we’re going to play Michigan poker with an Indian Scout and a Blind Cowboy humps his lady.” Which means he’s going to deal out a bunch of cards and make up the rules after he looks at his hand.) I have no problem with crazy-game players. The only problem is when they infect the other players. Soon, you have a whole table of guys trying to one-up each other by playing a game nobody has heard of. So every single game you play that night is completely different from every prior one. Which makes it hard to gamble. Basically, you throw money in the pot and pray. Still, it beats staying home watching CSI: Wichita. Especially if you’re drinking (and I was).

I made it home relatively early on Sunday and The Wife and I resumed tiling our bathroom wall. The second wall went a lot easier than the first, probably because of all the experience we gained the day before. It only took 2 hours to do and it actually looks pretty good. We’re almost becoming experts at this. And that was pretty much it for Sunday. All in all, it was an incredibly active weekend for us. Hopefully we can finish tiling our bathroom next weekend. Then if all goes according to plan, we could be done with it by Luke’s 10th birthday.