March Madness

On Sunday, we went to our friends' parents' house in West Valley. Mark and Lisa. They have become like pseudo-parents to us. They throw the best parties ever. They have a huge HD television and Lisa makes a feast every time we go over there. This year we decided to have a party the day that the brackets for March Madness comes out. We fill in our brackets. The guys also take turns picking teams, and then you get points for each game that they win. So it's just a couple of fun games that we play each year. It's funny because every year a girl wins the bracketology contest. And the boys won't let us play the other game (probably because they don't want us to win it too!).

So we had a really good time on Sunday. Dave and Brooke, Dan and Jordan, Me and Spence, and Mark and Lisa. We played pool and ping-pong. We watched the brackets come out. We filled in our brackets. The boys did their Fantasy Baseball draft. We played cards and games. Lisa made us a turkey dinner to die for and stuffed us like a good mother always does. We talked and joked and had a great time.

It made me really, really sad, though. This coming year Dave and Brooke and Spence and I will be leaving the area to go to school. It is really depressing to me. I have really loved being near our friends. I hope that we stay close and that we can all still come together for the Super Bowl and other important activities in our lives. I am really grateful to them all and have enjoyed their friendship.

So Mark, Lisa, Jordan, Dan, Brooke, and Dave. I love you all. And thank you for everything. Let's stay good friends and not let physical distance change our friendship. Okay?





Here is an article that I found funny about March Madness:

You’ll hear this time of year referred to by many different names — Bracketology 101, The Big Dance and more commonly as March Madness. But if you’re a college basketball fan, the rest of this month amounts to three weeks of basketball bliss.
However, the annual basketball tournament is apparently taking a negative toll on workplace production.
Last year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the nation’s oldest consulting firm, projected the cost to employers in lost productivity over the three weeks of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament exceeded $1.2 billion.
The first two days alone of the 2006 NCAA men’s basketball tournament cost employers around $260 mil-lion in wages paid to unproductive workers, according to the Chicago-based firm.
Add that to the $86 million lost each day due to workers spending an average of 13.5 minutes surfing sports Web sites and the lost profits add up quickly.
“It’s become the workplace tradition of our era,” said Chief executive officer of CGC Inc. John Challenger. “Unlike the Super Bowl or the World Series, you have the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that has 65 teams, so just about everyone in the office can find a team that represents where they’re from and track their progress.”
The fact that many of the games during the first two weeks of the tournament take place during the work-day doesn’t help out workplace productivity either, according to Challenger.
While employees will visit sports Web sites like ESPN.com to download and print their basketball tournament brackets, the added element of streaming content and following games in real-time via the Internet can add to lost workplace productivity according to Challenger.
“In December 2007, Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online; and these weren’t low quality video feeds either,” Challenger said.
In response to the annual college basketball tournament, some employers have blocked their office’s computers access to sports-related Web sites. But according to a Challenger survey of 100 resource executives, only six percent of companies plan to go that route.
Other companies, however, are taking a different approach to the matter, according to Challenger.
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” Challenger said.
And that’s exactly what some employers are doing, capitalizing on the atmosphere in the office that the NCAA basketball tournament creates to build a little corporate camaraderie.
Some employers even encouraged their employees to wear their favorite college basketball team’s gear to work during the tournament, despite the obvious loss of workplace productivity.
“Employers ultimately have to make a decision on whether they will measure employees in terms of the quality of the work they do or solely on their productivity,” Challenger said.