The pregame show: Minnow decides to forgo her usual 2-3 hours of naptime in favor of 2 <30-minute power naps. Bets are taken as to what time Minnow will crash (i.e, irretrievably collapse into a sobbing heap).
10 minutes before kick-off: We're racing to finish dinner because the crash seems imminent.
Kickoff: Minnow is making laps around the living room, pulling CDs off the shelf, climbing in and out of my lap, laughing hilariously for no particular reason. Behavior is increasingly manic.
5:01 remaining in first quarter (~6:50 pm). Giants score a field goal. We decide to get Minnow into her jammies, brush her teeth, and try to put her to bed. The crash occurs when Fish tries to brush her teeth. Minnow and I snuggle and nurse. She quickly falls asleep.
7:07 pm. Minnow is asleep in her crib. A whole hour earlier than usual. Will she stay asleep? Stay tuned.
7:10 pm. I grab my laptop and return to the living room. Meanwhile the Patriots have scored a touchdown. I blog this and then intend to start writing an exam.
7:25: I'm distracted by commercials. Am I supposed to know who the dancing woman was in the life water commercial?
7:27 Brady's been sacked, twice in a row.
7:36 pm. 2:21 remaining in second quarter. Something exciting happens in the football game. Well, as exciting as this game has been. I was hoping for a little bit higher scoring game. My own score: I've written one multiple choice question.
7:38 pm. The Planters cashew commercial irritates me.
7:51 pm. ~10 seconds left in the half. Patriots fumble, Giants recover. Reason to watch the last 10 seconds of the half.
7:54 pm. halftime. Patriots: 7, Giants: 3, my exam: +3. Time for some pie.
8:20 pm. A student emails me and tells me he can't access my class on Blackboard. I check my gradebook and don't see his name. But he is in my Banner class registration list. Poor guy. I guess I'll have to be nice to him and figure out how to fix his problem.
8:32 pm. The sales genie commercial with the pandas is not cute. Maybe commercials are funnier if you don't care about gender and racial stereotyping and prejudice.
8:50 pm. 9:30 left in the third quarter. Minnow wakes up. I'm heading upstairs.
Updated to add: The post-game (at least for me). As anyone reading this last night must have suspected, I didn't get to watch any of the fourth quarter football. Minnow refused to let me put her back down in her crib despite repeated good faith efforts. To use a sports metaphor, if I can't convert on the first three downs, I end up kicking it away (i.e., head to bed myself with her in my arms).
Final Score: Giants 17, Patriots 14, my exam: +7 (for a season so far of 23/50).
Monday morning quarterbacking: When I started to live blog this, I wasn't sure how my evening would wrap up. But as it did, it works as a nice metaphor for the way I feel about my life right now. I've got too many balls in the air to feel like I am doing a decent job at any of them. I didn't get to watch enough football for my own enjoyment, nor to have the inevitable conversations today with my male colleagues. My exam is not done, nor my lectures for either today or tomorrow, nor all the labs graded. And I've got a toddler that is nowhere near sleeping through the night. Sure, the balls are in the air, but is there any way I can score touchdowns?
/end sports metaphors. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
- Log in to post comments
I've just gone through the Blackboard problem myself. Login to your course in Blackboard. Select the "Teach" tab at the top of the page, click on "Grade Book" (under Instructor Tools) on the lower part of the page index, then select "Enroll Members". You'll have to get the student's user name, which in our Banner system is the part of the official univ. e-mail address that comes before the @ (as in rst0001@univ.edu, where rst0001 would be the user name). Good luck. Hope this helps.
Completely agree on the pandas. Odd and inappropriate.
I was watching the superbowl in Honolulu, and we actually all thought the panda commercial was a local Hawaii commercial interspersed with the national ones. We didn't realize until I read your blog that it was nationally run.
Interestingly, my opinion of it grew much worse when I realized it was a national ad. The dialect and interaction in the commercial is not dissimilar to other local Hawaiian commercials, and at the time it came across more as an only slightly inappropriate demographic touch. Knowing it was U.S.-wide changes those subtleties from an acceptable inter-island gimmick to an unacceptable racial stereotype. When I shared this information with the rest of the room, everyone else felt the exact same way.
I just find the effect of context in this case rather interesting, and worth commenting on here. Too bad the Pats lost :( Love your blog!
Here in Australia, the game is on the multicultural government station (it is a unique foreign cultural event, evidently), so there are no US ads. These days they take commentary during the breaks, but when I first came to Australia, the ad breaks were just a black screen with the SBS logo- now that was strange.