39 Days

When you’re home for a long period of time, and you’re not used to it, days can kind of run into each other without some sort of marker to make things more interesting.

And when that happens, something like the World Cup can be a real handy and fun way to mark time.

As I mentioned before, my son is a big time soccer fan, so, coming in, I knew we were going to be watching more than in days past, though I am what you might call a casual soccer fan.

What I didn’t count on was my wife becoming a DIE-HARD soccer fanatic during the WC, which made the experience all the more exciting.

Also, as it happened during the summer, my son was home for much of the day games, which led to some really fun afternoon experiences watching teams from countries that we’d largely never even heard of.

(You can, however, bet your bottom dollar that tourism to Cape Verde will go up significantly.)

Unlike recent Olympics, of which we are also huge fans, the matches all took place in North America, which means they were conveniently timed for us to enjoy live, without knowing in advance the result. That was fun.

Also, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Iwillnoteventrytospellhislastname were an absolute joy to watch, and should totally be added to FOX’s football coverage come the Fall. Can you imagine Zlatan saying terrible things about the Panthers, for example, in that dry Euro style?

A delight.

It was 39 days of real joy, and something we could all be wrapped up in. And, it made the world feel euphoric for a while, during a time when it’s awfully hard to be euphoric.

But now, it’s over. And that’s ok. All good things come to an end. And there are other ways to mark the time, but we had a really good one marking this period of time together, and it was kind of uniformly exciting to get into something together.

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As always, if you have it in you, please give a thought to donating time or money to Hospice Austin. They do amazing work for people who are going through the hardest thing a person can face.

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