Awesome

Marc and I cut out of work early on Friday, mostly to try to beat the holiday traffic that clogs up our commute. We went home, napped, and then went to have dinner with Steve and Erin and the kids. We hung out for a while after that - I was playing with Allison, and she was showing me her belly button, and then lifted up my shirt to find my belly button. I tried to discourage her by telling her that I had stomach rolls, and that no one wanted to see that, ha! But then she became fascinated by my stomach roll, and keep squeezing my stomach. A few minutes later, she lifted up her shirt, rubbed her hand over her stomach, and proclaimed to everyone, "Check out my body, I have no rolls!" Hilarious.

Saturday we drove down to Newark to meet my whole family for brunch. My aunt told us they'd be getting there sometime between 11 and noon, which is so laughably appropriate if you know my family. We showed up at 11:30 and were still the first ones there, as is usually the case. It was a buffet lunch, and I ate a lot.

We left straight from there at around 2pm to head to the Fremont BART station to catch the train to the game. There were quite a few Tennessee fans on there. We walked up through campus to the stadium, making our usual stop at the student store.

We were at the stadium about an hour early, so we got to watch all the pre-game warmups. There were already quite a few fans packed into the stands. Lots of Tennessee fans in our section, as well (I don't think I saw a single non-African-American minority among them).

Poor Marc had a migraine most of the game, and the sun beating down on us didn't help matters. At one point, I was standing during the game, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was some old dude, a Tennessee fan, sitting two rows behind me. He said, "Can you sit down so that we can see?"

I thought about just ignoring him (apparently my brothers ignored similar requests from the same group of fans), but ended up sitting. A second after I sat down though, DeSean Jackson ran a punt back for a touchdown, and I was back on my feet again. Most people in our section ended up standing for good parts of the game anyways, so it really became a non-issue.

I screamed myself hoarse that night. I don't really enjoy close, tight games as some people do - they're exciting, but emotionally draining, and I'd already been wound up for days for this game. By halftime, I was exhausted (it was a pretty long first half too).

I don't think I've ever seen it quite as crazy at Memorial (although Oregon last year was pretty close). It was impressive how all the fans got up for the game.

BART was crazy after the game. We got there, and they had actually shut down the gates because the platform down below was too crowded, and they had to wait for the next train to come first before they let more people in. It was literally madness.

Marc then had a good idea - head back up to the street and try to catch a cab to the North Berkeley station, which is upstream of the crowds (in other words, we'd get on a near-empty train, and arrive in the Downtown Berkeley station where the crowds would be waiting, but we'd have seats).

The plan worked great! We quickly found a cab, got to the North Berkeley station in a few minutes, and there was a train waiting right when we got there. When our train got back to Downtown Berkeley, there was indeed a huge crowd of people on the platform. But we had our seats, and we managed to avoid dealing with the throngs of people.

Sunday morning I dragged myself out of bed and took Bandit herding, then we drove down to Milpitas to meet up with my parents for dim sum, as a friend of theirs was in town. We went home and I lounged around the house for the rest of the afternoon. At one point, I was looking at Stubby, who was sleeping on the bed, and said to Marc, "Ah, must be good to be a cat." Marc pointed out that I was, at the moment, also lying on the bed, doing nothing, and how was that any different? Point taken.

Anyways, my brothers (Kenny came home for the game) came over that evening, and we went out for a sushi dinner and then just chilled and played games at our house. We were originally going to go see a movie, but Kenny had some work to do.

Monday we slept in, then spent some time hooking up the chiller for the fish tank, which didn't take as long as I thought it would, although the setup is pretty temporary. The tank has been horribly overheating lately, so I was really overdue in getting the chiller hooked up.

We drove down to Union City in the afternoon to meet up with Leslie to watch The Bourne Ultimatum. It was pretty good!

So that was about it for our weekend - I still need to finish blogging about New York. I'm so far behind!