March Madness is maddening!

ARRRGGGGH!!! Darn technology. The cable has apparently gone out as of this afternoon, and since the cable (noos.fr) supplies our internet we're back to borrowed wifi bandwidth. On the bright side, we seem to easily get through the waiting room at sportsline.com's MMOD; on the dark side, the bandwidth isn't enough for more than choppy audio. Soooooo ... back to refreshing the scoreboard, though thanks to iTunes we're about to watch the 10-minute versions of all last night's good games, including Duke-Southern.

I forgot to detail yesterday our funny Thursday afternoon. I picked up both boys as per our new routine, about 4:30. We had a meeting about summer camps at one of the school's other buildings, maybe 8 blocks away, at 5:30. Carter hadn't finished reading up on all 64 teams and filling in his bracket the night before, and we had to get it logged into my office pool (not to mention our 3-person family pool!) by 6:00 here to meet the noon ET game start time. We knew we couldn't get home, do it, and get back to the school by 5:30, so we decided to visit our friends at Fat Tire Bike Tours. Several new guides arrived in the past couple of weeks for this tourist season - seems like they're all fresh out of college, though maybe that's just my age showing. We'd met a few of them, and Lisa and Claudia and Dave (and Bailey the dog) are always very welcoming, so we headed there to get a snack and finish the bracket. They thought it was hilarious that we prioritized such things, though with many Texans in the crowd they agreed that brainwashing the kids early is critical. Anyway, I cracked the whip and got Carter to start picking based on what he knew already rather than decoding and analyzing every matchup, as he wanted. After he finished the first round, every matchup he'd say something like "Wow, Pittsburgh-Kansas, that's a tough one!" Then make his pick and write the full name of the team. I finally had to say, "Look man, make your pick and just write the first letter!" He got through it and I have to say he made some good picks, and will probably win the family if not the office pool. We'll keep you posted.

Oooh, we got appliances today! Short version: fridge and dryer working (since they only have to be plugged in), washer and dishwasher need to be installed, oven was broken in transit, plaq (stove) still needs to be installed, huge useful closets are up. We'll send pics tomorrow.