Superbowl Sunday

Ah, here it is, Superbowl Sunday.  The big day where most of America parks in front of their TV's wearing their football jerseys, screaming at the TV and may or may not be more interested in the commercials than the game.  Myself, well, while participation in sports has always been a big part of my life, I don't make for much of a spectator, especially when I'm not at a game live. 

Most of the time when I was growing up we'd head over to Nana's house and sit in the aptly named "Big room" and watch the game on the big screen TV.  She had a big screen TV long before everybody had a big screen TV, so it was a big deal then.  And sometimes I'd bring a movie to watch upstairs.  My mom would make what she calls her "white trash chili" in which she is selective about whom she shares the recipe with, since it involves Campbell's tomato soup and ketchup.  I have to admit, it's pretty darn good. 

Superbowl Sunday was one of Dad's favorite days, as you can imagine.  Sometimes he'd take me skiing at Cannon since it was two-for-one day.  Then he'd park himself in front of the TV and watch as much coverage as was available.  Sometimes he'd go to Nana's, but sometimes he'd just stay behind because he not only wanted to watch the game in its entirety, but he wanted to listen to the game and not have the commentary be overshadowed by other people in the room who have no clue about football and ask those kinds of stupid questions that people tend to ask when they have no idea how the game is played. 

He was a die-hard Pats fan from the time they were a team in the NFL.  He and my uncle Bob, Dad's twin brother, had season tickets way back in the day and my mom still has the stubs.  I do believe that the entire season was just over $100.  But you see, for a long, long, long time, the Patriots were terrible.  But he stuck it out.  We were actually on a ski trip to Colorado when the Patriots went to the Superbowl in 2002, and we had t change our tickets home because we were due to fly back during the game.  He was only disappointed that he couldn't watch the local news coverage all day since we stayed an extra day.  Coming home early would've made the trip too short.  It's too bad he's missing his favorite day, although it's not so great that the Patriots screwed up so badly.  In fact, my brother said to me that one good thing is that Dad wasn't around to see that travesty of a game.  Good point. 

Ok, enough about that.  My rest week is coming to a close and I can only say GOOD.  Don't get me wrong, I needed it and I appreciated it, but just put yourself in my shoes for a second.  Yes, I'm in great training weather and able to focus on pretty much nothing but training, eating and sleeping.  But, yeah, there is nothing but training, eating and sleeping.  You take away a lot of training hours, and suddenly you're left with a lot of empty hours in the day.  And I have seven TV channels, essentially.  Well, seventeen, but three are shopping networks - yes, seriously, three shopping networks - four of them are in Spanish, one of which actually tends to show some pretty awesome movies, unfortunately dubbed in Spanish, three more of them are of the C-SPAN or other news variety, meaning I would never watch them, and one is PBS.  That doesn't leave with a lot of day-to-day entertainment options.  It's a good thing I brought an arsenal of my DVD movies as well as all episodes of 30 Rock available on DVD thus far, which I could easily watch over and over again... and have. 

So, needless to say, I am ready to get back into a more consistent workout routine again.  I am glad, however, that my rest week coincided with that freezing cold spell we had here.  Seriously, they can't handle that kind of cold here.  There was a gas crisis in part of town and some people are still without heat.  I've already become a cold weather wimp.  At least it looks like we are going to be back to normal this week with temperatures in the 60's and 70's.  Phew. 

Hmmmm... what else?  Well, a good chunk of time today was spent cooking some food that should carry me for much of the week.  After overdosing on turkey and pumpkin chili in the first couple of weeks I was here, I took a break and am ready for some more again.  I froze some though so I don't have to eat it every day.  I also made some chicken tortilla soup, although there weren't actually any tortillas involved, just kind of a nice, spicy flavor.  Although in all honesty, the two recipes were awfully similar, a lot of the same ingredients but only a few alterations.  Hopefully I won't get bored with them.  I also cleaned a lot so basically I've set myself up so that I have almost nothing outside of the usual to do over the next few days.  Oh, good. 

I guess that's about it.  I should start paying attention to this game (we're in the first quarter, still nothing to nothing) and of course the commercials.  One good thing about watching by myself: nobody is trying to get my to buy Superbowl squares or anything like that.  I never win crap like that.  Ok, time to pay attention.