A Giant Surprise

We’re watching the Giants spank Dallas yesterday and enjoying ourselves immensely. The little ones are hootin’ it up. So I give them their daily bath, towel them off, brush their hair and get them into their jammies while the wife cooks. Then we go back to the game and, to our distress, the Cowboys are spanking the Giants.

And it went back and forth for a tense fourth quarter. Eli does his thing, the final minute drive to score, and they do. But then Tony Romo decides to do Eli’s thing, and with seconds remaining, fires one to his wide receiver at the back of the end zone.

The crowd goes wild.

The announcers go wild.

We’re shocked and dismayed. In disgust, I turn off the teevee.

We send the girls upstairs, supervise teeth hygiene, read them books. The wife makes a phone call and I go down to the basement office to do a blog post. We watch Walking Dead. I get myself ready for tomorrow’s early-morning trip in to work. By eleven, I’m sound asleep.

I wake up the next day at five. Make my sandwich, have a bowl of cereal, shower, get dressed, get my umbrella, my cell phone, wallet, and book (Inferno), kiss my walking dead wife goodbye. It’s still pitch-black out there. No rain, but some eerie powerful wind blowing the treetops. I get to work in twenty-five minutes. (My bosses would later send us all home by noon.)

The wife calls me around nine. “You’ll never guess what happened!”

“What?”

“The Giants won!”

“What?”

“The Giants won!” She explains to me how the receiver had a finger or something go out of bounds before his feet touched, or something to that effect. I haven’t yet seen the video.

But now I learned one thing. Well, two. First, the New York Giants are the most hands-down frustrating football team in the NFL right now. In the sense that they make winning as insanely difficult for themselves and their fans nearly every single week. Everything goes down to the last second in a typical Giant game.

And, two: never shut off a Giant game until Terry, Howie, Jimmy, Michael, and JB are yuckin’ it up.

Pre-Storm Dreams

Had a typically weird dream last night. How weird? Well, put it this way: I was a mid- to later-aged Hollywood actor playing a Pakistani Inspector Clouseau.

During the film I had the impression the humor was supposed to be very “hip” and sophisticated, but really it was just silly. Making fun of a suspect’s name (“billibongo” or something to that effect) and wearing outrageous costumes (a robe that looked like the comforter on the downstair’s couch) seemed to be the primary ways of obtaining a “laugh.” I don’t remember if there was a laugh track in my dream, but that is a possibility.

Then it morphed into me interrelating with some old coworkers, possibly because, yes, I have to go in to work during the hurricane, and then a scene of me listening to some embarrassing old demo tapes.

Oh well. Gotta get in the shower, get to work, and make the donuts, as they say.

Bring It On, Sandy!

As you may know if you’re in the northeastern section of the United States, the Apocalypse is happening tomorrow. Er, actually, a category 1 hurricane is hitting New York. The media has done it’s job working the twenty or thirty million residents of the tri-state area into a frenzy. All that’s now left is for the actual wind and rain to fall.

We’re prepared. We still have batteries and candles leftover from Hurricane Irene September of last year. A battery-powered radio, a half-dozen flashlights, and matches. We have plenty of non-perishables, too: bread, soup, granola bars, cereal, apples. The laundry is all done. The yard’s been mowed for the last time this year, and I picked up three large bags of leaves. Checked all the gutter drains (all leading away from the house), cleaned the gutters over the garage (can’t reach the ones over the house), put all trash cans safely inside the garage. Took pictures of the house and yard from every angle, just in case.

Bring it on, Sandy!

The schools have all pre-emptively closed, so my wife has to deal with two unpredictable little ones on her office day tomorrow. Oh, and she still has to work on a presentation to be given in New York City on Wednesday. Me, I have to get to work early Monday, as early as possible. One of the things I do is payroll, and this is a payroll week. I have 165 employees who will be looking for a check on Friday, hurricane or no. I only hope my place of business doesn’t get flooded out or lose power. I don’t want to handwrite 165 paychecks.

Anyway, I will continue to blog daily so long as we have power here. Last year my house sustained no damage from Irene, nor did we lose power. The Halloween Snow Storm of ’11 was a different story, however, and we had no power for three days. We’ll see.

I’m hoping the only damage my lot sustains is a couple of tree branches strewn about the back yard. That, and only the minor-ist of strains to the wife’s sanity.