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We could probably start a separate youth sports topic as we diverge from the World Cup discussion, but I'll say as a parent of youth swimmers- there is so much pressure on kids to excel in their sport. Our kids attend arguably the best swimming high school in the state, but are not the best swimmers. So many kids go out for swimming that they have to cut swimmers, so they have to swim club year-round to keep up just to be on the high school team. If we put our foot down and forced them to do another sport, they could fall behind and not be able to continue on the high school team. We have seen first-hand that swimming 42 weeks a year on multiple teams can cause muscle and joint fatigue because they are being overused. I really want my daughter to do another sport in the spring instead of club swimming, but she doesn't want to get left behind.

I went into my buiding on Monday and my office wasn't actually that bad, but the elevator and hallway were brutal. One of my coworkers said his office got to 100 degrees during the heat warning, which I believe. My wife's building is another that has had reduced cooling, but it's not closed. It has been hovering around 80 most of the past couple of weeks, not condusive to much getting done. She is not allowed to be remote 100% of the time like I am due to my building being closed.

Great discussion on why soccer isn't a big deal in the US. Some additional thoughts: Parents often dictate what sport a kid is going to go into. They see soccer as a great entry point to team sports because a young kid can play without having refind gross motor skills. They just need to run/jog and kick a ball. Ever see a 5 year old try to swing a baseball bat or shoot a basketball? Once a parent sees their kid mature a bit, they move to other sports. Kids will play the sports their idols play, that means they most likely want to play football, basketball, or baseball. Those three sports are easy to access on TV and the radio, so it's not hard to follow the games. Soccer is not as readily on TV, even with more streaming options, and none of the best players (aside from Messi in the twilight of his career) play in the US. The top athletes in the US play basketball and football, with baseball coming in a distant 3rd. For many, they see those two sports as the golden ticket to money, either through a scholarship/NIL or eventual professional sports.

I am a UW-Madison employee. One of the chilled water distribution pipes burst late last week, so many buildings on campus are currently without air conditioning, my building included. They have closed the affected buildings, and are planning on having this resolved in about a month. That means we can't go to the office to work until they reopen the buildings.

We haven't been camping since Labor Day 2024. We have a trip planned this weekend, and my back decided to give out Sunday night. It usually takes at least a week for it to start feeling better, which means after we're done camping. I do not know how I'm going to pack and set up our camper Friday, but I do not want to cancel the trip because it's been too long since we've gone.

I said the same thing to my wife last night, only used Aaron Rodgers as my example.

You might want to check on those rental properties. I saw a lot of pictures of larger hail from the east side of Madison, and lots of cars in the surface lot at the airport were properly damaged by the hail. I know DeForest also had some gnarly winds overnight Monday night. We're in Middleton, and there were parts of town that also had the very large hail.

The severe weather in general this week. We avoided the baseball sized hail that some of Dane County received, but we still had golf ball sized hail. Fortunately, we have a metal roof, but there are a few small dents here and there, and somehow the solar panels appear undamaged. Our neighborhood is very sloped, with our street being pitched, and all of our back yards slope downhill (we're 2 blocks from Lake Mendota on a hill). Our neighbors on the high side of our house just moved in over the winter, and they inherited broken gutters that cause a lot of water to pour into our yard. The previous owners somehow mitigated it, but this year water has literally cascaded down the steps we have in the back yard, and it pools under our deck. The neighbors are aware that their gutters are broken, but didn't know the scale of runoff we were experiencing until we met with them the other day. New gutters won't be installed overnight, so I'm hoping they can come up with a solution to stem the runoff into our yard.

The ID.4 is on my list as well, but I've read horror stories about them having issues and being in the shop. My hope is that a used one will have been repaired already, but perhaps it was returned/traded in because it's such a problem child. It's probably one of the best options for us size-wise. I want something that's a small-ish SUV with AWD, but I'm sort of lost figuring out what to get. I'm looking at used because the depreciation is already built in, and I can pay cash for it rather than financing. The Mach-E is on my radar, but not much else right now.

Definitely not the same level of dominance over the course of 6-10 years, but the Middleton boys swim team has won the last four state championships, and the girls have won the last three. The two best boys swimmers are seniors, but the best girls swimmers are sophomores and juniors, so I suspect the girls run will last a couple more years.

We're just past the halfway point in February, and we have produced more energy than we have consumed for the month so far. Looking at the forecast, I expect that to change, but I cannot wait to see what our electric bills moving forward are.

I probably ranted about this before, but youth sports culture is bugging me. I have two daughters, both are in club swimming. My oldest daughter also swims in high school, and her high school team is very, very good, so she needs to do a bit extra to be good enough to make the team each year. Between club and high school swimming, she gets a total of 6 weeks off a year from swimming. She will be off from early March to early April, then off for about two weeks in August. During the seasons, she has practice 5-6 days a week, and also sees a personal trainer to help with strength (I feel like that's a bit over the top). This all has led to her being at a level of injured since the end of October. She has shoulder tendonitis, and now a pulled hip muscle, both of which have caused her to miss parts of swim meets. The problem is if she doesn't do the club season, other swimmers on the high school team may pass her, and she could run the risk of getting cut. Swimming is her life, but I wish there was room for something else. (I am encouraging her to go out for track- I feel like that could actually help with conditioning for swimming.)

Because the College Football Playoff is a separate entity than the NCAA, so it's not an NCAA championship.

One played at an AAA stadium because the city decided not to help pay for a new stadium and the owner threw a tantrum. The other team played at a spring training stadium because a hurricane significantly damaged their main stadium. If you want to discuss whether or not Tampa should have a team based on attendance, that's fine, but they weren't in a small stadium this past season due to oversaturation in baseball, and the A's won't be in a minor league stadium forever.

It's become an annual tradition that someone in my family is sick. We had three years in a row where someone had a stomach virus, several of us got sick over Christmas on a trip to the Dominican a couple years ago, and now this year one of my kids has a fever. If it's not Christmas, it's Thanksgiving (another stomach flu one year, pink eye, random fever)...