IF I HAVE one vice, it’s my full-fledged fixation with fantasy football.
As my special ladyfriend can attest — albeit, unenthusiastically — it is an obsession.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I spend less than 30 minutes looking for ways to improve the Felonious Ferrets, my fantasy franchise.
I comb through the waiver wire each morning, fire off a few trade offers if I have the time, then devour copious reports speculating who to play and who to sit.
In the month leading up to the season, I did one or two mock drafts a day.
That’s right, I spent more than an hour every day DOING FAKE DRAFTS OF FAKE DRAFTS.
Sick? Perhaps.
A complete waste of time? Probably.
Thanks to that diligence, however, the Ferrets find themselves sitting in second place with just two weeks left in the (fantasy) regular season.
If that’s not something to be thankful for on another gray turkey day, I don’t know what is.
Why? Because if the Ferrets win the title, yours truly also wins a stack of cash.
Maybe even enough to pay for the gift I’ll need to buy for my ladyfriend to make up for the last three months of fantasy football-filled neglect.
Here are a few other things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving day:
■ Got crab? — Today may be the day of the turkey, but this has certainly been the year of the crab on the Peninsula.
One would have to search long and hard to find any complaints about this year’s crab fishery. And there’s still another month left in the season.
In fact, the next three evenings are a prime time to actually wade out into the darkness with the Coleman lantern and grab a few.
■ La Niña, parte dos? — The weather folk are predicting a second straight La Niña year.
If that’s the case, we should get another sizeable snowpack atop Hurricane Ridge this winter.
That’s good news for winter sports fans, who will once again get seven-day-a-week access to the Ridge this winter (insert federally mandated “weather permitting” qualifier here).
Those who like to access Obstruction Point Road before August, however, might not be so thankful.
■ Basketball returns — If I have a second vice, it’s my insatiable appetite for all things basketball.
If I’m not watching it, I’m reading about it or playing it.
Let’s put it this way: You know you’ve got a serious problem when you’re updating your Twitter feed every hour on the hour in search of positive news on the NBA lockout.
Thankfully, I don’t have to care about the Association anymore with college basketball season now here and high school hoops right around the corner.
If another couple of hoop-free weeks had gone by, I might have broken down into a shaking, trembling mess a la Nic Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.”
■ Yours truly . . . in color! — As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, the PDN sports page recently underwent a bit of a makeover.
At the top of that list, of course, has been the addition of color to select sections throughout the week.
Obviously, that’s something all sports fans can be thankful for, not to mention the scores of Peninsulites who’ve been clamoring to see a certain hirsute outdoors columnist in living color for years.
Drink it in folks. It always goes down smooth.
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Matt Schubert is the outdoors and sports columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. His column regularly appears on Thursdays and Fridays. He can be reached at matt.schubert@peninsuladailynews.com.