Gobsmacked!

Lovely word gobsmacked. If I understand it correctly it means to be greatly surprised, stunned even by a sudden turn of events.

And that's exactly how I feel about the football pool this morning.

It was a wretched week. I only got 9 of 16 games right, I missed on my top two favorites (Tampa Bay losing to San Fran and Houston losing to Oakland) so I knew my point total was going to get hammered.

Well so did everyone else's. With 77 points (which is like 60% of the total available) I was only 20 points behind this week's #1! So instead of FALLING in the standings, I ROSE in the standings! Only 3 people above me overall outscored me this week. Astoundingly I'm now only 90 points out of first place overall. Of course with only 1 week left the chances of me winning approach zero. But my goal was to finish in the top 10 (only 8 points away) and within 10% of the winner's total points (I'll have to finish within 150 points of first so I'm probably in pretty good shape for that one too).

The really funny thing is that I'm totally dumped the statistics analysis routine and just gone with my gut. Watch out for coast to coast games (like that TB/SF one!), watch out for division games, rivalry games and bad team/bad team and good team/good team matches. The problem becomes teams like San Diego who can be very good and very awful. Tough to pick week to week.

So I'm at #14 overall and was #14 for the week as well. Pretty sweet. One last big week and we'll see how we do.

Otherwise a bunch more snow last night. Followed by rain and 40 degrees on Weds, snow and 30 degrees for Christmas, rain and 40s Friday, rain and 50s Saturday then winter returns. Weird. But we can use some snow pile reduction again so I won't complain. And it makes doing some Christmas travelling easier too.

Peace