Sports, illustrated (with lots of pictures!)

It was a very sporty few days at our house recently, starting with the beginning of the NFL season - which means the 4th Annual I.I.F.F.F.L. - Izatt Invitational Family Fantasy Football League.

As always, I was in charge of the pre-draft set-up. We condensed to one team per owner, mixing AFC and NFC players. Participants this year: Chuck, Jana, Sam (once again drafted for, very ethically, by Chuck), Pam, Leslie & Keyan, and Matt & Niina. Niina is a foreign exhange student from Finland living with Leslie and Matt and their family, so we figured fantasy football was a pretty good American culture experience! The kids stayed busy during the draft - Keyan went back and forth between helping his mom pick players and going down the slide :) Here's Keyan announcing their team's final pick, which wrapped up this year's draft.

The final draft board.

The guys, analyzing all the teams.

My living room was spared this year; instead we hung the draft board in the bonus room along with Chuck's Boise State posters. I'm resigning myself to the fact that our (eventual) next child's nursery will be football-themed.

The next athletic event came the next morning with a church paintball activity. Chuck helped organize it and Pops and Mallory were able to go as well.

All the 'ballers, minus Pops who was taking the picture.

Cute Mallory waiting for the game to start.

The following Monday morning I left my house at 5:45 a.m., drove to Boise State and got in line (at about 6:15) for tickets to the BSU-Oregon game.

This was the line directly in front of me, it began at the ticket windows and wrapped all around the indoor practice facility back to where I was, almost to the river.

This was the line behind me, including the people around me with whom I became fast friends, especially this awesome girl named Tessa. Funny story: we spent about five hours together, but didn't think to actually 'introduce' ourselves with names until about four and a half hours in. We were seriously freaked out to find that three of the four guys in our little group were named John. Seriously, I looked at their ID's. Weird.

All the folks at the front of the line. This was about an hour before the ticket windows actually opened. When I arrived that morning, most of these people were still asleep - on air mattresses. Legally, they weren't allowed to sleep out all night so most of them stayed in their cars until about one a.m. when the cops let them come out and get in line.

There's the guy from channel 7. He walked by us at one point and I asked if they had an estimate of how many people were in line (on the six o'clock news they reported 150-200 so I wanted to know if they had an update) and he said, "Oh, about fifteen!" and kept walking. Hilarious.

So as I walked the l-o-n-g ways back to my spot in line, I counted by fives to estimate how many people were ahead of us - about 640. Plus there were two other ticket locations. Plus each person in line could use up to three student ID's to get tickets, meaning up to six actual tickets (the policy has now been changed slightly to allow more actual students to get tickets, instead of people buying guest tickets only to resell them). So it wasn't a huge shock when tickets sold out an hour after the ticket windows opened, with me still WAY back in line. Seriously disappointing, but not hugely shocking.

So, we ended watching the game at home, which was a lot of fun. We got all dressed up in blue and orange, invited some friends over, ate lots of good food and watched the Broncos win :)

I believe this was the first actual tackle of the night.

Will outside earlier destroying my flowers. Good thing he's cute!