Posts Tagged ‘Mn Vikings’
Mental Preparation
This morning, I am kicked back in the recliner in front of the fire, enjoying the calm before the storm. We have been warned. Our region is about to experience a narrow band of snow with a huge gradient in amounts from 1 to 12 inches. As of now, our county still appears to be sitting dead center in the heaviest snow zone.
The predictions are regularly updated, and weather service computer models will present shifts to the north or south as the time-to-event shrinks, so I am excitedly refreshing the live updates in hopes of determining if the worst is to come. I like to be totally prepared.
This will be the second Sunday in a row when the Minnesota Vikings will be engaged in the high competition of this season’s NFL playoffs and we have a distraction interfering with my ability to give the game my undivided attention.
I’m framing that as a good thing.
What choice do I have?
The forecast is ominous enough that I am already thinking I will stay off the roads tomorrow and miss a day of work. That hurts double because we are so busy at the day-job that I worked on Saturday in attempt to make extra headway toward keeping up. Missing Monday is a stab in that plan.
The Federal Government is in a shutdown mess, so my local concerns feel a little petty in comparison. The President had the gall to claim the Women’s March was celebrating “unprecedented economic success and wealth creation.” Ouch. So much ugliness.
Thank goodness I can hug Cyndie, walk outside and toss hay, stack firewood, coo to our chickens and breathe in the scent of our horses hair.
It helps me to mentally prepare for whatever tomorrow is going to bring.
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Reluctant Fan
Two nights in a row now, I have stayed up past my bedtime to see evening entertainment. Last night it was the NFL Minnesota Vikings. I call myself a reluctant fan because I don’t like how the league and the games have changed over time.
I grew up in a household where Minnesota sports were always on the TV or radio. We had season tickets to the Vikings games starting back from the time the team arrived to the state.
If I couldn’t go to the games in person, I wanted to watch them on television. That television coverage is part of what killed the game for me. TV networks took over and began to control the timing of the breaks. I lost my love of watching the games in person.
Eventually, I lost interest in watching my team fail. Other things claimed that time slot for me and I figured I had broken the spell. I was free of the game’s allure.
That was before my old home team began to show signs of being successful again. The pull at the beginning of each season is hard to resist, so I tend to check them out, just in case they might perform well.
This year, it was made more dramatic by the loss of our quarterback right before the season was about to start. All the excited anticipation went out the door in a blink and our usual inevitable doom seemed to settle in before we had a chance to get started.
If that wasn’t enough, we lost our star running back in the second game. A smarter me would have bailed on the team right away. But something happened.
We won games. We put up good stats. We started earning respect, reminding me of teams of old, when I was a kid.
Against my better judgement, I slinked my way onto the bandwagon. The coaching staff seem to be leading the team the way winners do, and they are succeeding despite the loss of key players.
They are making me feel young again.
The pessimist in me is wondering how long this is gonna last, but the kid in me is going to just enjoy the ride for as far as it is able to carry me.
Like a fan, only with a little bit of baggage… called reluctance.
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Relative Something 