Monday, September 16 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone! I just stepped outside to let the dogs. The morning air is cool, and there's a thick layer off fog resting on everything. It's hard to believe it's going to get up to 80 degrees today - and all week. Yuck.

This weekend was pretty great. It started off a little rocky with the outage at work, but it appears I just needed some family time, good food, and of course, a little football. For those keeping score, the Bears won yesterday. What a wild game! We held off Denver up until the last quarter when they inched ahead with an embarrassing two point conversion. I thought that we were done for. We had about 30 seconds remaining, and up until that point our offense had been pretty underwhelming, and I was doubting we'd be able to make it anywhere close to field goal range. But miraculously, Trubisky completed a pass with one second remaining, which was just enough time for Eddy Pineiro to drill a 53 yard field goal. Given how our last season ended, Chicago fans deserved to be on the winning side of a clutch field goal situation. I'm happy we got the win, but the game demonstrated we still have some serious jitters to sort out, particularly in our offense. It appears we've over corrected and chosen to disproportionately run the ball, and I hope that didn't get in Trubisky's head, because he had some pretty terrible passes (except for the last). To borrow from a reddit comment, winning that game felt like walking away from a bloody crime scene. I will say this, we have a hell of a kicker and a hell of a defense, and I think we can work with that.

It was an exciting game, and even though it probably shaved a few years off my life, it was fun to yell at the TV and celebrate. Marissa and I agreed that we weren't expecting football to get so exciting so quickly. I thought we would have to pay our dues and watch at least a handful of dreary, scoreless losses or something.

After the game, we sat down to eat some chicken wings. I made a batch of Chef John's RAM wings (which stands for Rosemary Ancho Molasses). They were pretty good - definitely the best batch of wings I've ever made. And that's no surprise, I believe Chef John hails from West New York, so I imagine he knows what he's doing. They were a bit too spicy for Rod, so tossed an odd combination of sliced turkey, mayo, and pickles. Half way through dinner, we all broke out into laughter when Marissa goaded Rod to eat, saying "Rod, eat some more of your… uh… stuff."

After dinner, I worked a bit on the file server while Marissa painted, then we reconvened sometime around ten to watch TV. We found a new show called Undone that instantly sucked us in. We're already over half way done with the season, but the episodes are brief and engaging, and as long as they aren't setting me up for a terrible ending, it's already joined the ranks in my all time favorite TV shows.

I'm grateful for this weekend. Work was really tough on Friday, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to shake it off, but with enough family time, football, movies, chicken wings, hobbies, and naps by the fire, I forgot all about work. This morning, it's back to reality. This week we have a lot of clean-up to do. I tried to stay off work slack all weekend, but it's safe to assume I'll spend most of today helping to compile a report for the outage on Friday and working on what broke. It will probably derail our team's plans for this quarter, but I think that's fair. An outage like the one we had on Friday should be a bit of a wake up call. I'm ready to jump in, knowing I have my arsenal of relaxation waiting for me when I get home.

Hope you all have a wonderful day today. If you too are feeling the Monday blues, try to remember all the wonderful, relaxing things you have waiting for you at home. Bear down, readers.