Football and Me

I've been pretty sick lately, thus the dearth of posts. I was sick for a week in early September, but now I just have a lingering cough. The Boss got sick too, but she's better now. There's the oink-oink flu scare here, so having a fever isn't good. Fortunately, we're both better now. :) (I got asked if my Boss had a fever by one of our school officials. I told her no. Which was true since she didn't have a fever when we took the Boss' temperature that morning. I wasn't going to tell her that the Boss had a fever the night before.)

I love football. I love playing football. I love watching football. I love listening to football but that's not as good as watching or playing. I thought about how to get my football fix out here. There has been some talk of getting a Slingbox , but, for now, I'm gonna do it old-school like it was when I was in elementary school. I'm just going to listen to the radio. I decided to record the Cal Bear stream and then listen to it later. For all you folks in country who care about football (currently, none of my readership) here's how to do it (on a Mac).

1. Make sure whatever team your following has a radio broadcast that they stream online. If you're a Cal Bear or Niner fan, you're in luck! Joe Starkey still broadcasts for Cal on KGO 810 and the Niners are on KNBR 680. Look for radio streaming.
   
2. Put the radio stream in iTunes.
   
3. Figure out what time your team is playing and let iTunes run. (Don't forget the timezone change!)
   
4. Schedule WireTap Pro (yeah, it's not free, but it's a great program!) to start recording at that time. Set it to record for 4 hours.
   
5. Go to bed.
   

So I did this last night for the Cal-Ducks game. I woke up, terribly excited. Like a small child that desperately needed to go pee, I sat in front of the computer clicking nervously, listening to the broadcast. As I began listening, I faced a moral dilemma: should I go and see if Cal won?

In college, I would get depressed after watching my teams (9ers and Bears) lose. I would just go to my room and mope. Sometimes I would play hours and hours of Eradicator or Quake just to dull the pain. So it's really difficult for me to choose to watch my team lose.

I decided to listen to it without the benefit of pre-knowledge. This is one benefit of living in a significantly different time-zone that is ahead: you feel like you are living in the future and that you have mutant super-powers. But I wanted to make sure I got the whole game, so I clicked to the end; that was my undoing. Joe Starkey spoke solemnly of the need for the coaches to convince the players that this was an aberration. You usually don't speak that way of a team if they had won. Since I knew they had lost I went and checked the scoreboard. They got blown out!

I am not one of those who enjoys watching the suffering of small puppies. Sigh. I don't think I can stand listening to my team getting blown out. So there goes part of my plans for today.