Lucky is loose, draft day

I left work early yesterday to do prep for the draft party at the house.  On the way home I swung by my buddy’s place and picked up Lucky.  After about 5-10 seconds of confused growling Lucky remembered who I was and was all tail wags from there out.

Lucky has a history of getting car sick.  When he is in a vehicle it seems like you have a 50/50 shot of getting some barf on the floor mat.  In the past I seemed to have more success when I kept my hand on him at all times, petting him for assurance.  My technique worked, we pulled into the driveway sans puke.

I immediately went in the back yard with Lucky and he immediately took off sprinting around.  He has tons of energy and is fast, faster than Sadie.  He managed to find a few of the wet spots in the yard and looked thrilled to sprint through them.  Don warned me of his affinity for water so I pulled out a towel ahead of time to dry him off somewhat before letting him inside.

Once I was inside I immediately got busy with the considerable prep for the party.  I totally rearrange the great room for the event, pushing all the normal furniture to the outside walls and then pushing the big dining room table, perched on top of furniture sliding pads, into the middle of the great room.  This may be the only time in the past year the table has actually been utilized.

This is what the room looked like when I was finished moving things around.  I then worked on getting the laptop up and running which would be used to connect remote owners via Skype.  This laptop is getting pretty long in the tooth and is barely up to the task of supporting a 4 way video call.  I shut down anything that wasn’t absolutely needed so it could dedicate as much processing power as possible for the video call.  I also hardwired it to my network instead of using a wi-fi connection.

I did some loose math in my head and ordered 6 large pizzas from Hungry Howie’s, opting for the much more expensive delivery option as opposed to picking them up.  I was worried about getting back in time if someone showed up early.

Well I figured poorly on both accounts.  6 pizzas would have been reasonable if there wasn’t a mountain of additional food brought in by other team owners and nobody knocked on the door until 6:50, 10 minutes before the draft was supposed to start so I could have easily picked the pies up.  Oh well.

I was somewhat worried how Lucky would react to all of these strange men entering the house.  I was surprised he basically had no reaction, sort of taking a “oh here is another human” attitude.  He was quite happy to interact with anyone that approached him.

We wound up with three team owners dialed in remotely.  On occasion their video feed dropped briefly but for the most part it was almost like having them sitting in the room with us.  I had my normal draft diet which consisted of 5 or 6 Bud Lights in the cool aluminum bottles and a gluttonous amount of the various food items that were piled up on the kitchen island.

Despite my typical lack of draft prep, according to the draft analyzer I had a surprisingly strong draft, on paper the second best in the 12 team league.  You can see my initial roster on the left.  The draft wrapped up around 10:15.  Everyone thanked me for hosting the event once again.  I turned down offers for help with the clean up, knowing it was my burden to bear, it’s part of the deal when you agree to host something like this.

I first worked on getting the mountains of food sorted, cleaned up and in some cases thrown away.  I had 3 or 4 unopened bags of chips and pretzels to go along with another 2 or 3 partial bags.  I had two varieties of chocolate chip cookies and a big tray of nearly untouched mini-brownies.   The spanikopita I baked was hardly touched and only two of the six pizzas I bought were consumed, sheesh….  I also have enough beer left over to remain drunk around the clock for a couple weeks.

By the time I got the house back in order it was after 11, and my head didn’t hit the pillow until at least 11:30.  I have had precious little sleep this week by my standards.  I am hoping to score myself at least one night with a full 8 hours of sleep over the weekend.

On my way to work I offloaded some of my food surplus at Ali’s place, donating two cheese pizzas and a container of spanikopita.  I brought additional food to the office where it is sure to be consumed by my hungry, hungry co-workers.

This weekend I am looking  forward to bringing the girls out to the house to play with Lucky.  Sadie should especially have fun, playing with a dog that actually has more energy and is faster than she is.  With the tremendous deluge of rain we had last night I have lakes all around the property.  I have no doubt I will go through quite a few dog drying towels over the next couple days.

I’d like to get outside this weekend to fly the Blade MQX around but I won’t tempt fate by doing it with bodies of water nearby.  I also have everything I need to start construction on my TuffWing.  Hopefully I can steer some time into that as well.  I also might get out to see KicakAss 2 in the theaters.  I found the original surprisingly entertaining.  My meal plan for the weekend is going to be very heavily pizza based.