Frenetic fun
I left work a little early yesterday to prepare for the draft party at our house. Ali wasn’t going to be home so I had a lot to get done.
One of the first things I did was get my various incoming connections up and running. I also tweaked the set up a bit so the audio from the Skype connection would be be played over the surround system.
A couple owners got connected in via Skype early, one of which was the guy that is over in Barcelona. I was glad to to see that despite an ocean being between us his connection quality seemed good.
I placed the order for 8 pizzas a little after 6 and threw the two food items I was preparing in the oven around 6:30. The first couple guys showed around the same time for the 7 pm draft. They brought their own beer despite my having a healthy supply of my own.
The pizza showed up about 6:50, perfect timing. Right about 7 the rest of the owners piled in. A bunch of them carpooled from Naples. I saw some of them coming in with even more food which we totally didn’t need.
The first part of the draft was very hectic for me. I was handling several technical challenges. The one remote owner was running Skype on a Mac. Every time he would try to make a video connection he would wind up dropping from the call. We actually wound up just having one of the 5 remote connections using both video & audio. The audio only connection worked out fine though for the most part. We had one connection that had some sort of noise that sounded like a submarine. We just had him mute his mic unless he was talking.
It was very cool using the Skype group call. I had the webcam on one of the surround speakers pointing back at the room. It really was almost like having those 5 guys in the room, the interaction was very real time.
It became very apparent that I went too heavy on the food. The pizza was not being consumed at nearly the rate I expected and the beer that I bought was being mostly consumed by myself.
The draft itself went smooth after the early technical glitches got worked out. Just like last year, my picks were very rushed and produced with little thought since I was busy most of the time tending to things. It was actually a little more challenging this year since I had the last draft slot which means when I draft I am always drafting two players consecutively.
My team is very Eagle heavy so if the Birds are no good this year my fantasy team is going to suffer. Here is my current roster.
So the party wrapped up somewhere around 10. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. After they left we did a food survey. We had 5 full pizzas remaining, a pile of spanikopita (spelling), 15 mini-sandwiches and about 4 bags of chips, chex mix and other similar items.
Well Ali and I were certainly not going to waste pizza so we shoved it all in the freezer. The sandwiches would be my lunch for a few days. We literally have enough food to feed us for lunch and dinner for a week solid at least.
We cleaned up what we could. I didn’t have the energy or motivation to put all the furniture back in order.
I woke up this morning feeling pretty wiped. Between the drinking and eating too much crap food my body felt like shit. Hopefully I can cleanse myself a bit at the gym today.
Tonight is going to suck at home. I want to mow the grass, get the house back in order and we have 100+ registrations to put into the system for the race on Saturday. Yuck.