Oh what fun it is to ride

On Thursday my friend Jacob called to tell me that he might be able to get tickets to this morning's Oregon-UCLA basketball game. It seems that his mom gets tickets from her job to offer to clients, but sometimes the clients can't go. When that's the case, she can use the tickets herself. It sounded like her client was going to be busy, so Jacob and I were going to get to use the tickets. He told me this right after we lost our first game of the year, losing by two to USC. It sounded like the Ducks played tough, but couldn't quite pull it out. That was a distinguishing characteristic of the team last year: lots of talent but an inability to finish tough opponents. I had been hoping that this season would be different.

Last night I talked to Jacob again and found out that the client would be taking the tickets after all. With that, I sunk back into my recent routine of watching as much LOST as possible, hoping to get caught up with the series before it returns on February 7. When my connection wasn't working so well I stopped trying to do that and started catching up with season two of Entourage. Before falling asleep I decided to take a ride on my bike this morning to figure out how long the trip to my new practicum site would be. Well, I ended up watching another episode of LOST before taking off, and so I didn't get onto the road until a little after 12:00.

I had a nice ride, and found that if I'm making good time I'll be able to get to school in about half an hour on the bike. I'm looking forward to this because it will solve one of the problems I had in my New Year's Resolution post--how to work out regularly and keep getting my foot healthy--and it will save me money and emissions. When I got back my phone was flashing with several messages. My friend John from Phoenix sent me this text:

That was a sweet game by your ducks. I was happy to see ucla lose. Congratulations

I had forgotten that the game was this morning, so I went on to listen to my one voicemail. It was another friend congratulating me, but this time at halftime. Halfway through the game Ian Lovett had called to wish me luck as the Ducks were up 40-30.

A few days ago I was going to post about how my two basketball teams, the Blazers and Ducks, had taken the confidence that had recently been reserved for my two football teams, the Seahawks and Ducks. But then Portland started going way downhill, and I got worried about Oregon after the USC loss. It looks like at least one of those teams still deserves my confidence, since Oregon proved that the close games will come sometimes this year.

It's too bad I didn't get to go to the game this morning, but it was a good bike ride, and it was really good to come back and have the nice surprise of winning a huge game.