Dave's Thoughts of the Day: October 16th

We must not speak of that trainwreck that is the San Diego Chargers...

Giants bucked the prediction and won last night 7-1.  It's about time they won a home game and they played great!  The Scutaro injury could be overblown, but that remains to be seen.   I missed the play with Holliday, I'm not sure what his involvement was... unless HE was the guy that dug into Scutaro.  I was bouncing back and forth between this game and the football game, so it got a little hectic.

The price of gas in my neighborhood finally went down.... two cents!  Oi.

I'm announcing a new campaign for the Winter and Spring swim meets coming up:  I want to swim a 50 yard short course freestyle in less than 38 seconds.  My first attempt at this race in 2011 was a good effort, and I finished in 39 seconds.   This year, in February, I finished in 38.06 seconds.   This is going to be a fun challenge!   I will dub the campaign #break38 .  Spread the word!

What's interesting is that if I do such a program, I would need to schedule my events a little differently than usual.  A freestyle intensive program this time around will most likely be the call.  What that means is that I'd like to try one more swim meet this fall to get in a couple of IM events.  Once the spring hits, I'll try to set it up so that the 50 or 100 yard freestyle events are first and then swim any remaining IM events on the schedule.

There's a thing I do with coffee sometimes that approximates a mocha.  The reason I don't just order a mocha at the coffee shop is two fold:  1.  They put too much sugar in it.  2. It costs almost twice as much as a regular coffee.  Well!  When you go over to the cream and sugar station, you get the milk, the sugar, AND the powdered chocolate.  Then, it's possible to mix a custom mocha to taste.  It is terrific!

There's an outside chance I go to San Francisco this weekend, and that chance depends on the Giants.  If the Giants can extend the series to 6 games in baseball's NLCS, a friend and I will be able to travel up to SF for the game and potentially, and I don't want to jinx anything, but potentially there may be free tickets in effect.  I'm not at liberty to divulge the means for how that comes to be, but the point is, if I have a chance to see an NL playoff game (even between two teams I usually don't root for), it would be awesome!

It's a long way from happening, and either the Giants or the Cardinals would have to work their way into a 6 game series first.  I should mention that I like the Giants to win Game 3 on the strength of Matt Cain.  He's not at his best, but I'd give him at least a shot!  Even on the road, doncha think?

I mentioned on tmf.com that it freaks me out how closely Al Michaels lives from my apartment.  Now to add another dimension to this, there are rumblings that his favorite restaurant is literally around the corner and down the street from where I live.   I mean it's just coincidence, and I never factored celebrity houses into where I chose to live, but this is getting trippy now.

And you know what's so wild about all of that?  Al Michaels lives, shops, and eats this close to me and yet I've never seen him!  Not once!   That's probably for the best... who knows what hell I would cast on him by simply saying hello and shaking his hand.   I don't think any person who meets me can avoid  a jinx in some way, shape, or form.

Even people who don't even know me get destroyed.  I never told this story, but last April, when I volunteered to log the times of swimming races at our UCLA Spring Meet, I was working a lane trying to write down the times of swim events using a stop watch.  A partner has his or her own stop watch and also stops it when the swimmer finishes the race.  Then we use these jeopardy style buzzers known as pickles to stop the clock.  All was going well UNTIL, one guy rushed over to the lane after I was chatting up some other lady (I forget who it was, there was a lot going on) and he asks "Is this heat 7?" and the problem is that the scoreboard up top usually doesn't display the current heat until the race is well underway.  That's how I remembered it, but then I wasn't sure so I just went what it said "Heat 6" and said "yea I think it's still heat 6".  So he's like "ok whew I'll calm down."  Then the race starts and theres no guy in our lane!  He was supposed to swim the heat!

The next heat sets up, you get all these guys excited about it coming in and that other dude, realizing he missed the swim, runs over to the judges to complain and suddenly a whole cluster of things happened. The officials had to stop the meet... and completely re-seed everybody in the next heat or so.   People had to switch lanes all over the place.   It was a mess.  Then everybody was messed up... the Heat 8 guys were messed up, the Heat 7 dude was messed up, but it was a very nice thing that the judges managed to get him back in.  I didn't even know you could appeal that.  Usually if you miss your heat, adios!  Man...  I hope everyone forgot about that... I still feel bad for not keeping track of all the heat numbers.

Tonight... it's a new "New Girl" on Fox!  Or is it?  I have no idea, I'll be watching something else.  Unfortunately, I'm still banned from making Yankees-related comments.

Until next time, farewell!

Edit:  Oh Good Lord...  I forgot tonight was the next Presidential Debate!   "New Girl" will need to take a back seat... for a while.