9/30/22 Thursday Night Games Are A Hassle?

     Everybody likes to talk about the Friday Night Lights, when probably 80-90% of high school football games take place, but there are also Thursday night lights and they just aren't as bright and celebrated, for a reason.  It is a rough hangover to rise the next day, after being out there win or lose, and come back the next day to business as usual.  With as many high schools in the Austin area and only three main football fields to share, there becomes a necessity to be flexible.  Adding to the many high school, there is also a doubling of teams when the JV teams and even the freshman teams get counted.  Crockett was fortunate enough to have enough headcount to make both a freshman and JV team, but many of the schools in our district do not, which is a double-edged sword.  We want there to be a constant pool of incoming boys getting experience and thus being ready for their turns at varsity, but the more teams the more often they end up playing on off days, like Wednesday and Thursday.

    Given all that, the varsity team played last night, Thursday, against another Austin school, LASA (Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy), and it was a dominant victory for Crockett.  The game ended probably around 10:30pm, but then it takes a good 15-20 minutes to leave the parking lot, then another 20-30 minutes before the boys get back to campus and change to their civilian clothes.  By the time we sat down to eat, it was around midnight.  That is rough, it is hard for our boy who is all hopped up on testosterone to just turn it off and go to sleep.  He said it was near impossible to get up when his alarm went off, and he overslept until almost 8:00am.  It has to be even harder for Wife who has to get up 5:20 am to leave the house by 6:00am.

    I don't mess around, because of how our company works nowadays, I am just taking the night off when the games are on Thursdays and I don't work on Fridays, so for me it is just a matter of waking up to take Mijo to school and then I come home and chill.  Sadly, there are only a handful of games left to savor at this point, like all good things, the season will end before we know it and then love it or hate it, we won't have much to worry about games on Thursday nights, so really, enjoy them while they last.

9/29/22 Homecoming Vs LASA?

     It was a rare thing, but I loved seeing the Cougars dominate a game from start to finish.  I think after the way they let off the accelerator with McCallum and allowed them to get back into the game, they were not going to do that again.  Against McCallum, two weeks ago, they started off strong with a 28-7 lead and then slowly watched as the other team worked themselves out of the deficit and totally dominated the second half of the game, ending something like 49-28.  This was not that game.

    First off, Mijo was finally cleared to start and play following all the problems with his left knee.  Also important to this was his friend, another lineman starter was cleared to start as well.  Finally, most of the experienced line was back on the field, which doesn't seem that important, but I don't think our QB was sacked once and only a few times was he pressured in the pocket.  To be fair, our QB is phenomenal, and probably had 400 yards of total offense himself.  The Coogs put up 14 points in the first quarter, another 14 points in the 2nd quarter, and kept building all game long.  With 5 minutes left, I went down on the track to put away my Cougar flags, and they still scored once or twice again in that time.  It is a totally different feeling down on the field, almost magnetic.  You can feel the tension and the release as they got near the endzone and then the screams as they scored, it was a weird feeling.  I loved seeing the boy's faces smiling as they knew they did a good job.

    Making the night more special was that it was Homecoming night, and the stands were as filled as I have seen them for any game involving our boys.  It helped that it was a beautiful night for football.  It probably started at 7:30pm with a temperature around 85 and ended with a nice cool 75 at 10:30pm.  All the facets of high school football were there.  The band was in full uniforms, they have a competition this weekend, the Tex-ann's did their usual stunning work, the cheerleaders took care of business on the sidelines, and even the crowd was rowdy and on their feet the whole game long.  It was really a perfect night for the Cougars.

    Here is to hoping they can do this a few more times this season.  Winning tastes good.

9/28/22 FInally Over All The Knee Stuff?

     OMG, I hope we are finally over the knee stuff.  Mijo has lost about half his football season already.  What started as a minor knee injury has turned into a much longer series, but I think we are finally over it.  After hurting his knee, we took him to the doctor, they determined nothing was broken or torn, so it should have healed within a couple weeks.  This did not seem to be the case, so we went to a specialist, he said basically the same thing, to maybe give it a couple more weeks, so we did.  He did say if the pain persisted, we could consider doing an MRI, to which I thought meant we were going to have to go somewhere else, maybe a hospital, so I held back.  After no improvement, we opted for the MRI, I was a bit bothered to know they did the MRI right there, in the same office.  It should have been done right away.  Either way, it did not show any damage, again, but Mijo was still saying it kind of hurt.

    This then got us on the path to try physical therapy, which I liked, they were showing him how to strengthen the other muscles around the knee, such as his gluteus maximus, which are large muscles and the do a lot, when properly formed.  We did this for about three weeks, and although it was super early, I didn't mind much if it meant getting him stronger and back in action.  It was going fine, but not miraculously improving, as I hoped.  Last week, all of a sudden, he developed a cyst/boil behind his knee.  I thought it could just be poked and bled, but everyone thought I was dumb.  That is exactly what they did, the doctor did minor surgery, lanced the boil in the fat part and squeezed all the juicy bits out.

    This now seems to be what is called a baker's cyst, which are very common with knee injuries.  After a knee injury, extra fluid from the knee has to go somewhere, and a lot of the time, it just pools behind the knee.  This is a good safe place for this to happen, there isn't much contact back here.  Once lanced, the knee almost magically started feeling tons better, to the point he was showing us how well he felt with no pain doing these really low squats in the kitchen.

    I am just glad the doctor gave him his blessing to get back on the field.  He will be playing tonight (Thursday), which is what the coach wanted, to get him involved for the district games.

9/27/22 Are Actual Pictures Still Worth Something?

     I don't know if I am wasting my money, but I went through the pictures taken all last wrestling season, by the team photographer, and I put together my version of a book for Mijo.  The pictures are a Hodge podge of action, some people have whole matches caught from start to finish and some of the kids barely have a picture or two.  I don't think this was intentional, some of the kids just got more attention as they found ways to win.

    Mijo was lucky enough to get plenty of attention when he fought, some based on him being the heavyweight, so it always seemed exciting to see what the big boys were going to do.  Honestly, the lighter weights have a more athletic, almost artistic way of fighting, being that they contort and bend while controlling their bodies to perfection.  With the heavyweights, a lot of times it was just two bulls pushing back and forth to see which one would tire out first and give in to the more fit person.

    That aside, I used Shutterfly for my projects, I chose it randomly and it has been alright, thus far, other than they tend to charge a lot for shipping and delivery.  Putting the book together was fairly straightforward, they have a template, it is up to the person doing the work to decide how many pictures per page.  I did vary it between pages that had up to four images to some where there was just one blown up picture that tok all of the page.  I went 27 pages long; I think the book starts with 20 pages and more can be added at a cost.  I would have preferred to have added all the pictures taken, but I really don't know half the kids, so putting them on a book seemed weird, why save them for later, if we don't know their names now?

    Aside from the book, I also ordered some large pictures from some of the images we have taken recently.  I wanted a large 12x12 pic of Mijo with his 2 close friends in uniform and then Mijo took a cool pic from above his head with most of the linemen eating breakfast together one Saturday morning.

    I don't know if kids today prefer to just keep their pics in their cameras, but I feel some images should just exist in their world, where they can see them regularly, this is why I thought those pics were good to make into large prints.  I want to fill his walls by the time his senior season is done.

9/26/22 Finally, A Raise?

     Well, it was a long time coming, but we finally got a raise.  It wasn't some gigantic change your life type, but it was nice to see my salary going up, for once.  In the last 12 years or so, we had not gotten a raise and had actually gotten two salary reductions.  IT sounds bad, but I guess in the moment it seemed right.  The first pay cut was at a point when it seemed like our company was going under.  The solution they came up with was to do pay cuts across the board.  It sucked at the time, I lost 25% of my salary, 10%, which most everybody did, then my 15%-night shift differential.  I managed to bitch and moan my way back to my 15% differential back, but then because I was no longer working from 7:00pm to 7:00am, it was taken away in the last year or so.  I did not fight that one too badly, I did manage to keep 10% differential, and that means I work until 11:00pm, theoretically.

    The raise basically gives me back what was taken when I lost the night shift differential, which I guess is fine.  For a long time, I was fighting for every nickel and dime I could get my hands on, but now that Wife is doing good, I have stopped fighting for more money.  I am comfortable in the job I have and what I do.  I have kept it out in the open that I leave early, I mentioned it to our CEO yesterday, I don't want him acting like it is new information if he decides to use it later as punishment.  The "leaving early" thing started with Covid, and basically, we were told to get whatever needed to be done and due the next day taken care of, then feel free to go home.  This was mostly to reduce the interactions and reduce the spread of Covid, I guess.  What it did, was change the way we work.  I used to work following the clock, knowing I was going to be there 10-12 hours, I would do all my prep before lunch, take a decent lunch, then I could plan on coming back after lunch, sitting on the tool with a Netflix/Hulu movie or show and pace the work until the end of my shift.

    Now, the plan is to come in and start running the tool as fast as possible.  I may have half the job prepped if it has many samples, well, I will start the sequence and as the samples keep getting prepared, they are getting analyzed.  Nowadays, I just don't think about going to the breakroom for coffee or killing time like before.  I don't even think about turning on a computer for entertainment.  I stay focused hard on prepping whatever needs to be prepped and running it on the analysis tool.  I also have been running both analysis tools at the same time to finish in half the time.  This means the work gets done, but in half the time, most nights, which translates to me being home in time to eat dinner with my family.

9/25/22 Busy Homecoming Week?

     Well, we started Homecoming week with a bang, I guess.  Some of the booster club moms thought it would be fun if w we went and decorated their locker rooms in Cougar stuff.  What we ended up doing was hanging a bunch of streamers and balloons in the jock corridor of the school.  We did finally get a view of the boy's locker room and where they keep their football gear.  It was nice to see Mijo's locker decorated with last week's dress shirt and tie plus one of his belts.  By the time we left, I did go ahead and grab the dirty clothes to bring home and wash.

    We all did what we could, probably favoring our kid a bit more.  One of the moms was not shy, she put about 7 balloons and a door streamer thing on his locker and left.  The rest of us tried making all of the lockers a bit more festive.  We didn't buy anything new, but Wife had bought so many extra streamers for the mum we're still working on, that I decided to take all the extra stuff and hang it up around the lockers.  We did put a little extra around Mijo's locker, but it was a cheesy gold streamer that I couldn't figure what to do with as far as the mum was concerned.  I thought it made sense his locker has the dance squad motif because he is dating a dancer.

    My other thought was to put candies in all their lockers, so we bought a couple bags of Halloween candies and placed some in every locker.  I want these kids to remember they are still kids at heart.  Give your best on the field, but I also hope you are enjoying your time while doing this.  I kind of was surprised at the birthday party when they were all suddenly playing freeze tag, which is a kid's game, but they are all still kiddos, it was cute, other than when the 250 pounder is barreling at you at full speed.

    As far as preparations, I have mentioned it to mom, they are coming for the game, whether he plays or not.  I asked his brother if he wanted to come to the game, I didn't get a yes, but I also didn't get a no, so I will call this a possible maybe.  I am not sure if Wife has invited her folks, but that could be another wad of people to come and watch.  What we need is a win, these guys have worked tirelessly all summer, they need to see some victories to match the sacrifices and hard work they do.  Here's to hope.

9/24/22 Party At The Swoop House?

     We went to a party in a semi weird location, for us.  This Swoop house, as it is called, is a house in East Austin that is basically downtown, but since it is on the East side, it is still hidden and surrounded by trees.  It felt like we were out in the country somewhere, even though there was a lifted road almost over the road we drove in on.  I was honestly a bit confused because the party was for the girl Mijo is dating, although it is complicated in that the parents haven't outright given their blessing, so the relationship is kind of hidden from them.  Adding to that, we now know the parents and they come and talk to us at every game and function we see them at, but according to Mijo we are not to discuss them, so we just keep acting dumb, even though we know they aren't fond of Mijo, or they don't want their Mija dating.  It is all annoying and both Wife and I just want to scream "WHY DON"T YOU LIKE MIJO, EVERYONE LOVES HIM?"  

    Other than that small fact, the party was kind of cool, well, it started at 7:00pm and when we got there it was just hot, and humid, and we were all supposed to hang out outside.  There was one small dining area in the house, but the party was clearly meant to be had outside.  Before the sun went down, all of the East side mosquitos had a nice drink of my type O+ blood or whatever I have and fattened up for the winter, both Wife and I got bit so many times, I stopped fighting it, even after applying half a bottle of OFF.  By the end of the night, most of the mosquitos had filled with our blood and the weather cooled just enough to make being outside tolerable, I still wanted to stay inside every time I went to go get more food.

    It is a smallish house, but it has a large catering kitchen, and the island was filled with food.  I guess they had a small kitchen crew that stayed hidden or blended in, I never noticed who was doing it, but every time I went back for more food (and I did because it was a chance to be in A/C), the food was restocked.  Because it was a girl's birthday, the main serving was salad, but there was plenty of chicken, beef, bacon, and all the other stuff you put on salads to make it worth my while.  She also loves macaroni salad, so there was a giant bowl of it, and it was actually pretty good, I usually avoid it and just consider it filler.  There was this wavy tray that held hard shell tacos already prepared, so I grabbed a couple, then some bean filled quesadillas that were technically vegan, but I ate about 8-9 thinking they were bean cincos or something.

    I guess because she had her dance squad there, the big thing was dancing, once it got dark, the Tex-anns took over the dance floor and danced everything from Queen to cumbias to country.  It was fun seeing Mijo dancing first with his boys on the edge of the dance floor and finally dancing a song or two with his girl.

    The only rough part was that there seemed to be no ending for this party, and we did have to be up early for yet another booster activity in the morning.  We left the party at midnight, headed home, got in bed after taking a shower, I needed it after all those bug bites and tons of OFF on my skin.