Every once in a while I have to remind myself what day of the week it is.
The holidays and the days ZAGS games are played and Annie's comings and goings have tended to confuse my mental calendar.
It used to be that ZAGS games would be played pretty regularly on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays.
Nowadays, they might happen on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday or a Friday.
When they start halfway into our beauty-rest hours, that really gets crazy.
Those of us who have been programmed to these set schedules get thrown into chaos whenever that schedule varies.
And, with Annie, sometimes she leaves to go back to Seattle on a Sunday; rarely on a Saturday.
When Bill took her back to the airport on a Saturday after Christmas, it didn't matter. I was firmly in Sunday mode and then had to do my Sunday all over again the next day.
Those changes throw us off with ease. Besides, when one retires, every day is a Saturday, right?
While on this subject, I'm going to tell you a story today about a basketball game in the past week (on a Saturday) that really disordered my mind.
Happily, I discovered later that younger minds have had the same experience.
Willie's Bulldogs went to Wenatchee on Jan. 1 for a three-day tournament.
We were able to stream the games, thanks to Hudl.com.
The Bulldogs won their first game, which was against Sequim that Thursday afternoon.
On Friday, they didn't do so well against Cheney. That was kinda okay because my friend Marian, a Blackhawk alum, was happy.
On the final tournament day--a Saturday--I had my laptop all ready in the morning and tuned in to the Hudl link for the afternoon game against Wenatchee.
I use the laptop so I can put it on top of Bridie's crate and Bill can watch the game too.
Game time came. As had happened every prior day, there seemed to be some stupid glitch getting into the live action.
So, I pulled out my phone, clicked on the link and kept it going while trying to figure out the problem on the laptop. There was no figuring to be done. I never could get into the stream for the Wenatchee-Sandpoint game.
So, I gave up in disgust and continued to watch the game on my phone, occasionally announcing the score to Bill. The Bulldogs were doing very well throughout each quarter.
As soon as the game ended, I proudly posted the score and news of the victory on Facebook.
A few minutes after that, Daily Bee sports reporter Max Oswald, diplomatically corrected my score (56-40) to 51-39, adding "great win."
Upon seeing that, I wondered how my score could be so far off and finally rationalized that it was due to the small screen on my phone.
As is typical for me, the mistake with the score gnawed at me occasionally for the next few days, but that's as far as it went UNTIL I read Max's account of the game in the Daily Bee a few days later.
What I read was stunning because he wrote that the Bulldogs had recovered from a dramatic deficit at the beginning of the game.
No way, I thought. They led the entire time.
I eventually commented to Bill while handing him the paper that Max's report in no way resembled the game I had watched.
While mulling this over, I again wondered why my score had differed so much from Max's.
A lightbulb flashed through my troubled mind. I acted upon it almost immediately, checking past scores for the Bulldogs.
Mystery solved.
I had watched the wrong game---the entire wrong game. That Saturday afternoon I had once again watched the Sandpoint-Sequim game, which had been played on Thursday. The final score was 56-40.
The moral of this story is that if you stream via Hudl, be careful what you're watching. Hudl keeps all past games in their entirety and you can watch them any ol' time.
If you hit the wrong button, you'll see live action, but you'd better look closer. You won't hear much commentary unless the announcer's voice comes through clearly, which is not always the case.
As Annie says, "I always look for Willie" to make sure she has the right game. I do the same, but Willie was in the game on Saturday just like he was in the game on Thursday.
What perpetuated the problem was context. I had been trying to get the laptop version to work for a few minutes at the beginning of the game before finally relying on the phone. I had missed anything that would have given me a clue.
Plus, the gyms---they're in Wenatchee, and there was nothing I would recognize in the setting to tell me something was amiss.
So, in the end in my living room, Sandpoint played Sequim twice last week and ironically won by the same score in each game.
After reading the Daily Bee story, I confessed my stupidity to Max who must have thought I was totally crazy when I posted the wrong score. Lucky for me the Bulldogs won that game, even if I had the wrong score.
I forwarded my written confession to Max on to my daughter-in-law Debbie, who quickly eased my mind that I may not be ready yet for the looney bin.
"I get it," she said, explaining a Hudl experience she had had earlier in the season.
That evening Debbie had been relaying scores to me because I wasn't aware the game was being streamed. She also made some comments on the play-by-play that didn't quite match what we see in usual Bulldog play.
When I hadn't heard from her for a while and was curious about the final score, she confessed to me: she finally realized she had been watching the Junior Varsity game all along.
Gotta be careful if you stream with Hudl.
Of course, we know that in the current world anything goes when it comes to seeing what we see and hearing what we hear.
What looks like our garbage may be another person's treasure in the new reality. It's all in the perspective.
So, maybe I'm totally in fashion watching the wrong game and reporting the wrong score.
What day is it anyway?
Happy _________?
I'll confess that I nodded off through part of this but was definitely watching the right game.
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