Draft Day

So yesterday I left early to prepare the house for the fantasy football draft I was hosting, there was a TON to do.   The good thing was since this was the third year I was hosting I already had a pretty solid game plan on what had to be done.

On the left you can see how the great room looked before I began the rearranging process.  I worked a solid two hours buzzing around the house.  I needed to set up two tables so there would be ample space for owners to set up their laptops since many of them would be bringing one along.

I also had to work on getting the connection up and running for the three remote owners attending the draft.  Last year we used a new feature introduced with Skype 5.0, group video conference calls.  Last year it was a free feature in the beta.  Well evidently in the last year Skype decided to make this feature a PREMIUM feature that required you to spend some money.  Luckily they had a free 7 day trial of premium features that allowed me to slide by without dropping any cash.

By the time I was done with my efforts this is what the room looked like.  I wound up dragging in the chairs from the lanai for seating around the fold up table.  I also ran power strips under each table as a power source for the multiple laptops that would be in attendance.

To ensure adequate lighting I temporarily replaced the CFL bulbs that normally reside in the room with old fashioned 100 watt incandescent lights.

I filled the cooler with beverages and ice, labeled the recycling box, set up table snacks and handled a dozen other small details.

For my part of the food contribution I had a couple pizzas from Publix, spanikopita, tacquitos and bagel bites (which never even made it out of the box).  Luckily Ali got home before 6 to help with the food prep, I would have been in deep shit without her.

Prior to people showing up the house was hit with a SEVERE storm.  Leading up to the storm there was huge wind hitting the front of the house.  I could hear the garage door straining against the pressure.  When the rain hit it was literally a deluge.  Our property was actually well on it’s way to being water free until last night.  Unfortunately now we are back to living in marshlands.

The owners started showing up.  Most of them brought food or drink or both.  The kitchen island was stuffed with unhealthy food and we had three coolers of beer and other drinks against the wall.  Again Ali was a big help getting it all somewhat organized.

I had some issues getting the remote Skype connection stable.  One of the owners kept crashing Skype on my laptop when he connected.  It turned out that we only had 1 of the 3 remote owners connected in with a video feed, the other two were audio only connections.  It worked out ok.

In addition to our remote owner connection we used some more tech in this years draft, doing a “live” draft on the CBS Sportsline site.  It was pretty cool.  Basically you logged into the league website and launched a draft room app.  The app kept track of whose turn it was, who they picked and who was next all in real time.  It worked very well.  In the past after the draft one of the commissioners had to manually enter all of the picks into the system, a large pain in the ass.  This way, when the draft was done, all of the teams were already populated on the web site.  In fact this might make a physical gathering of owners in future drafts unnecessary except for social interactions.

Like I mentioned yesterday, for the second year in a row I had the last pick.  This is both a good and bad thing.  The bad is it means I had no shot to get an elite top 3 player on my team.  It also meant that my wait between picks was ridiculously long.  On the good side, when I did pick I was making two consecutive picks since the draft order tick tocks back and forth each round.

Just like every year, my fantasy football draft prep was very minimal.  All I had was a print out from the CBS site that ranked the players by position.  I was also busy doing party maintenance so not a whole bunch of thought went into the picks.  There were a few times when I kicked myself realizing I could have made a better choice.

You can see my team on the left.  For the first time ever I don’t have the Eagles defense which bums me out.  I did grab a few Eagles but only one of them would be a starter in my regular lineup.  I grabbed Ronnie Brown on the chance that if McCoy goes down, Ronnie could suddenly become a big point getter.  I also took a flyer on good old Donovan McNabb.  My logic was he now has a good offense around him plus he should have a huge chip on his shoulder after his embarrassing season last year.  He’ll have a hard time though bumping Matt Ryan out as my starter.

During the party I sampled some of pretty much everything.  My body isn’t very used to eating large amounts of junk food.  I felt pretty gross.  In addition it seemed like my illness symptoms ratcheted up somewhat during the draft.  I was blowing my nose and coughing more than I had been for a few days.

The draft wrapped up around 10pm, not bad considering we had 14 rounds of picks and didn’t get started until 7:20 or so.  Despite my encouragement of owners to take some food with them almost all of it remained.

My ass was dragging but I HAD to get stuff back in order before bed because the cleaning chicks are supposed to show up today for the first time in a couple months.  Ali had dozed off in the bedroom and was not thrilled to have to help me in the process.  I worked as quickly as possible to get the unwelcome chore over and done with.  On top of it all I had to do some data work for yet another race we are timing Saturday after the clean up was done.

By the time my head hit the pillow it was after midnight.  I woke up this morning feeling miserable.  Not only was I tired and feeling guilty from eating all that shitty food I was gimping around on very sore legs and ass due to first time in a month squats on Wednesday.

As I mentioned, we have a race to time Saturday.  I am hoping the rest of our Labor Day weekend is not too strenuous.  Yea of course I have stuff I need to get done but the list isn’t double digits long at least.  Ali is off work today so hopefully she gets a head start on the normal crap.