Bill Roper's Journal

That was one of the uglier football games that I've seen in a while. For all of the complaints about the referees favoring the Chiefs, there was only one penalty that I recall that hurt the Eagles (the first penalty call of the game, when the receiver definitely had his hand in the face mask of the defender more than once), while there was some larger number that landed in their favor or which didn't matter.

Not that the penalties really mattered, given the inability of the Chiefs offensive line to protect Mahomes. I would have sworn it was the Bears offensive line in the wrong uniforms...

The commercials weren't all that great either, although there were a few good ones.

And I suddenly discover that we're getting an extra season of "The Floor" right after the post-game show, so I guess I'll be hanging around for that. :)

Sadly, Kroenke and Goodell got the result that they wanted in the Super Bowl tonight.

Lot of penalties on that final Rams drive in the Red Zone...

(I honestly have no idea of how close the game had been called earlier, but it surely was interesting at that point.)

The wonderful thing about watching the Super Bowl with Gretchen (especially when I have no strong rooting interest in the teams involved, as is the case this year) is that there is no plot and a lot of essentially empty commentary by the announcers, so we can chat about things during the game and not lose track of what is going on.

This is not so much true of the commercials during the game. :)

I had decided that I would root for the Chiefs as they are the relatively local team, so I found the result eminently satisfying. (And annoying to the Bears, who passed on Mahomes to draft Trubisky. How's that working out, guys?)

Today was the last day of winter break (and of my time off from work). I didn't get done all of the things I might have hoped to accomplish, but some of the piles shifted.

Today, we took down the Christmas tree, took it to the curb, and the ornaments to the basement.

Katie had her first softball pitching clinic for the upcoming season.

And in honor of the really nice weather and the end of vacation, I grilled some lovely T-Bone and Porterhouse steaks that I got on sale at Mariano's.

In unrelated news, the Bears season also ended tonight.

Back to school and work tomorrow!

I decided to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. As it happened, a pretty good football game broke out and the team that I had a mild rooting interest in won, so I'll call it a success.

My favorite commercial of the night was from Kia. You should look it up. :)

It snowed a lot up in Minneapolis. Enough so that -- well, go here to see what happened to the Metrodome.

Talk about snowfall! ;)

Ok, I managed to miss all this. Then I tripped on this minicamp video for the Dallas Desire. Say what? And here's a story with a few more details.

Well, I suppose it's better than monster trucks.

daisy_knotwise and I listened to the latest mix of Hello, Stranger on the speakers upstairs after the Super Bowl. There are a few things that I want to go back and fix, but on a small number of tracks. We'll see what catalana has to say about it.

One of the challenges when mixing is getting rid of clicks and pops. Of course, I'd like to get rid of the ones coming from my knee, but I'll settle for minimizing the ones that made it to tape.

In any case, I now have a full set of candidate mixes for Hello, Stranger that are being uploaded for catalana to listen to and a CD burning down in the basement.

Now, if I could just figure out how the Bears managed to be trailing 16-14 just before the half...

Well, daisy_knotwise, Katie, and I are back from Confusion, despite the entertaining weather reports that we had gotten. The roads were actually in pretty good shape, which was apparently more than could be said for the sky, as we ended up bringing daddy_guido back with us since everything moving through the air between Detroit and Chicago had been canceled. We did wait to confirm that catalana's flight back to Champaign had left the ground before leaving, since we'd first promised her a ride to Chicago on her way back to Champaign if Northwest failed to get her home. But her plane left, Champaign apparently being more capable of airport operations than a major city like Chicago.

I blame Mayor Daley. Obviously, he's trying to prove how sucky service at O'Hare will be if we don't spend billions of dollars to make his buddies richer. Or something like that.

But Greg proved a good travel companion and it appears that catalana's plane actually landed in Champaign, so all's well that ends well. And Katie was exceptionally well-behaved on the trip back, although Gretchen did see her tugging at her harness at the last gas stop. I think she was about ready to be back home.

In the meantime, the Bears beat the Saints and the Colts beat the Patriots, so instead of a rematch of the 1986 Super Bowl, we'll see a battle for Midwestern bragging rights. Just as well to keep those coastal teams out of the game, if you ask me...