Tuesday, November 27, 2007

My first chance to DVR the Hoosiers

I love watching games from the comfort of my home on my DVR. I get to fast forward through commercials and halftime, I am allowed to turn off the announcers, and I get to watch the interesting possessions three or four times before continuing... and all in High Definition! Mmmmm....

So, now that I've seen the Hoosiers against a real opponent, DVR-style, here are some thoughts.

1. This team is loaded with potential... and to date it is largely unrealized potential. This is not too surprising. While I think it's guaranteed that this team will get significantly better over the course of the season, it's still far from certain that they'll realize their potential.

2. Mike White got elbowed in the face and they called a foul on him.

3. Speaking of potential, I think IU started the season with a ranking that matched their potential -- about #8 in the country. That's what I think this team can be. It clearly is not what this team is today.

4. DJ White jumped up to catch a pass and was undercut by a GT player as he was coming down, causing him to bobble the pass out of bounds, and they gave the ball to GT.

5. This is why playing cupcakes at the beginning of the season is a waste of time. Indiana needed to start the season against a couple decent teams to find out what they needed to work on. Beating Longwood gave the Hoosiers no good information about their strengths and weaknesses. Schedule Longwood right before the conference games start, if at all.

6. Gordon is really good, and dang, he's just going to get better.

7. There's been a couple years when I thought the B10 was better than the ACC even though they lost the B10-ACC Challenge... this isn't one of those years.

8. People who complain about officiating annoy the crap out of me.

9. This was a good win, but it wasn't the kind of game that causes visions of Final Fours to dance in your head.

10. Go Wisconsin!

Saturday, November 17, 2007

How I spent my Friday night

First, I'm now so old that I've been looking forward to Friday night so that I could sleep. I've been incredibly busy with work, and I needed a good night's sleep, so that was my big Friday night plan - take a sleeping pill and then sleep all the way through till morning. Yup, I'm quite the party animal.

Unfortunately, Tyler was having one of his bad going-to-sleep nights where not only did he not want to go to sleep, but he was constantly messing around and keeping us awake as well. Given Tyler's normal eagerness to please, this is a strange aspect of his personality -- sometimes he would rather have us so angry at him that we don't trust ourselves to speak than to just relax and go to sleep. Or just relax and stay awake quietly. I don't get it. Last night he was probably revved up because Morgan was at our house having a sleepover with Carson, and he was having a hard time switching his engine back to idle.

So anyway, now it's 12:30 A.M. I'm still awake, Tyler's still awake, Karen's still awake, we're all exhausted... and then Carson strolls into our room, crawls up onto our bed, pauses for a moment on all fours in between Karen and I, and then vomits all over the sheets, pillows, and blanket. So Karen jumps up and cleans up Carson and I jump up and clean up the bed, we remake the bed, get a bucket, Carson continues to throw up periodically, and eventually I go downstairs to sleep on the couch with the animals.

Hooray. It's the weekend.