Superbowl Notes, 2009

I had taken pains to make sure watching the super bowl would be simple and painless. This included having dinner ready by 4:30 (we get home from church at 4), cookie dough (for snacks) already made, and Mythtv set to record the whole thing starting at 4.

We were done with dinner at 5. I took my time cleaning up, even though Gavan was chomping at the bit, unable to wait for us to start watching the game. I started a batch of cookies and went downstairs to start watching with Gavan.

I'll interject here and say that I'm not a huge TV sports fan. I was in my early years, but those tendencies seem to have left me about the same time fatherhood arrived. (I'm not sure if there is a connection or not.) The truth is, I would have peeked in on the game at intervals, watching for perhaps five minutes at a time. In the mean time, Gavan would be riveted to the sofa, basking in every moment of it. Such is youth.

None of it was to be though. Our one-year old, while Nicole was retrieving some items from the crawlspace, where the myth server is kept, managed to press the exact sequence of keys required to send the machine into hibernate. While it was recording. The super bowl.

If you follow this blog, you know that we've had a few problems with our MythTv setup lately. Apparently, this was too much for the system. Bringing the machine out of hibernate while in the middle of a write (recording the show), and a read (we were watching it on the MVP) was a Very Bad Thing, at least to the poor XFS filesystem that received the battering. I had no choice but to bring the system down. In the process of bringing the system back up again, I was informed by fsck that my disk was in bad shape and that I wouldn't be using it until I personally rectified the situation. Ouch. That is two of two disks down for the count.

All I really wanted to do was watch a few minutes of football with my son.

I grabbed the nearest piece of long coax, intending to connect it from the dish receiver--in the crawlspace, to the television--in the basement. I was angry. And not just a little bit angry. My daughter's Hello Kitty kick-ball was the nearest object I thought I could kick without injuring anybody, so I took a swing at it. And when I say "took a swing at it," I really mean to say is that I kicked at it like it was the last kick an unreformed kicking addict would ever kick because it was the last kickable object left in the universe. I put my heart, soul and body into it.

I mostly missed the ball. And mostly kicked the door. Ouch. I'm not doing good here. My foot throbbing and turing grurple (green+purple) in spots, I connected the coax, made sure the game was on, and then let Gavan know to come downstairs.

It was halftime at this point. I retreated to a bathroom to let some cold water run over my foot. I helped some. I was sure I had broke something.

The pain subsiding, and firmly in control of myself again, I sat down at the console to take a look at the Myth system. I set up a temporary space to hold shows and brought it back up, sans 500BG of storage. Ugh. But at least it was recording. I switched the coax back and all was right and sane again.

I'm kind of glad I missed the first half because the second half was 30 minutes of the best football I had ever watched in my life. Coming back from 13 points behind is difficult enough. In fact, the only thing more difficult, I'd say, is coming back after letting a 13 point lead slip away. And I saw both of those things last night. Truly remarkable. In my heart, I was silently rooting for Arizona, the underdogs. I was elated as I watched Larry Fitzgerald streak 80 yards down the field to put Arizona up. And then a few minutes later, in awe as I saw a Steelers team, firmly in control, take the ball 99 yards down the field and score on Santonio Holmes pass. One of the best super bowls ever.