How Did I Get Here?

Quote of the Day: “If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.”

- J. Paul Getty

My daughter had a basketball game tonight and while I know all of you know that I love my daughter dearly, I have to say, our team sucks.

“A” for effort and all that but the JV girls have a lot of work to do. It just gets depressing to go week after week and see the girls make the same mistakes and get a beat down.

Tonight, there was an extra twist to the beating. We had a chance to win it.

This is not really a testament to the girls’ improvement but a statement on how utterly bad the other team was. I don’t say that to disparage because I support my daughter’s team as one of the few parents who even bother to show up.

I say that because I don’t see a lot of improvement as the season progresses. It’s just sad to see and I guess I can be thankful my daughter even gets to play since this is her first year on a high school team.

But back to tonight’s game, the ending was extra heart-breaking. I’ll set the scene…

End of the 4th period.
Time has elapsed.
The clock shows 0:00 and the buzzer has sounded.
But the opposing team fouled during the last-second shot.
Our player gets two foul shots.
We are down by 1 point.

If she makes both, we win.
If she makes one, we tie.
If she makes none, we lose.

All the players were cleared from the floor so it’s just the girl and the referee.

She misses the first shot.

I am torn between the thought that no one should be subjected to this kind of pressure, especially a young teenage girl and the thought that this is what sports are all about.

She puts up the second shot….

And misses.

Ouch.

I guess if there is going to be the thrill of victory, there must be the agony of defeat.

Poor girl, I just wanted to go and hug her. But I refrained.

“Steph, why was your dad hugging me?” she asks after talking to the nice police officers.

After the game we went over to my brother-in-law’s house and then we all made a trip to Godfathers Pizza, home of the best taco pizza this Earth will ever see.

I learned that the Auburn Godfather’s is not the only one left, as I thought it was. They say there is one down in Federal Way so now I have a back up if the Auburn one shuts down, or gets flooded out like I thought it was going to (and still might!) But now, I have another stay of execution before my beloved taco pizza joins the big Godfather’s in the sky.

You have no idea how important this is to me!

Later on when we returned to his house, I asked Scott about how I would go about installing a connection so I could play my iPod in my car without having to depend on the piece of shit FM transmitter gadget that I’ve been using. Seems I can’t get a usable signal worth a crap so I asked him what it would take to run a connector to the sound system.

This is what he does for a living so with his mouth watering, he hopped on his computer to see how much the kit was. He assured me he could get it 40% cheaper at cost.

It looked like I might have to give something up to make the connection. I have the single disc player connected to the stock radio so I didn’t want to lose that. And Carrie wasn’t about to give up the 6-disk CD player we have it in.

After discussing a few options, he noticed I had a stock tape player and he suggested that I try an adapter that looks like a cassette. You pop it in and then plug the other end to the headphone jack of your iPod or iPhone.

I thought, surely, it can’t sound all that great. I mean, come on, it’s taking an electrical signal and running it through a mechanical medium via a tape deck. I couldn’t imagine this would sound anything short of shitastic.

How wrong I was.

Scott is one of those guys who has a ton of various electronic flotsam hanging around his garage. He installs high end systems so he ends up keeping leftovers to the point that he has boxes of “stuff.”

Need an old VCR player? He’s got it.

Need an adapter that connects this to that? Here it is.

Need a 400 disc changer with its own power supply and hard drive? Over here.

So I was a little surprised when he couldn’t locate the adapter but he remembered he had loaned it to a neighbor who ended up not using it so he called him up and we went over and got it.

We plugged it in to my iPod, slid the cassette into the tape deck, and what came through my speakers was absolutely unexpected: crystal clear, loud music.

The bass thumped.

The high end came through clean.

It sounded better than the radio or a CD.

I would have never believed that you could use a cassette adapter to get that kind of sound but now I’m all set. And I didn’t even have to buy a kit or beg my bro-in-law to install it.

The only minor flaw was that the cord it used was white and Scott suggested to make it less noticeable, I should use a Sharpie pen to make it black. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me but he being a professional installer, the asthetics made a difference to him and he brought me a Sharpie.

“Really? This is how the pros do it?” I mocked him.

“Dude, you would be surprised how many times something like a Sharpie has saved the day on a high-value installation.”

So I spent the next hour coloring a white wire black. It was surprisingly difficult to get every tiny part of it and took me about 10 times as long as I would have guessed. I had to do one little section at a time and kept twisting it to get every little angle. The Sharpie would dry out and I’d have to get it flowing again.

When I was done, it looked, well, like a black cord.

I might have found my calling.

Free Advice for Today: “When you move into a new house, plant a rosebush and put out a new welcome mat to make it seem like home.”

- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.