In Mine

I've always loved sports. I can remember my older brothers huddled around the TV watching Monday Night Football, BYU football games, Lakers vs Celtics, and the World Series. We had what was probably a 19 inch TV that sat in an unlikely spot in the dining room, next to the cookbooks and piles of sheet music. Watching TV was a crime next to domestic violence in our house, so it was never watched. The few programs that were legal included sports, General Conference, Anne o' Green Goblins, and Sesame Street. Over the years, boundaries were pushed and walls were torn down, leading to the Freedom of TV Act in 1996, which was quickly repealed by Dictator Gary, but that's a whole other post.

The main problem with sports at the Hansens in the 80's and 90's is that there just wasn't near enough of it. If I got to see one game a week, it was a good week. The MLB Playoffs were great because I could watch TV every night, at least until my 8 PM bedtime. However, there was just too much time to kill inside my house, so I started creating my own leagues. At first, I did what the other kids my age did: play a pretend basketball with the nerf ball and hoop in my room where I was the star, winning the championship game. But that was over in like an hour. I needed MORE. So I started to create leagues of my own.

The first league I remember creating was based off of this old, monstrous, large-print Quadruple
Combo that had pictures of every temple in the world and all the prophets, too. It must've been from the 70's, and this Bible/BoM/DC/PoGP was probably 5 inches think and weighed about 20 pounds. It was my book of choice for early morning scriptures, because I could look at the pictures of the temples and prophets when it wasn't my turn to read.

So how did I create a league out of this Quad? Well, one day I looking at Brigham Young's picture and wondered why he had a university named after him but Joseph Smith, or any of the others, didn't. So I decided to create a league with universities from each of the prophets: JSU, BYU, WWU, JFSU, ETBU, SWKU, to name just a few. I also decided that each university should have a home field, based on a temple in the book. BYU's was the Provo Temple, of course, and JSU's was the SLC temple. I can't remember the rest of them, but I'm sure one of them played in Hawaii, and one of them was even at the Swiss temple. Don't worry, I took the distance into account for the home-field advantage.

My favorite part about creating a league was making the composite schedule. Every year, in the BYU Football Media Guide there would be a composite schedule at the back. I loved studying it and found it so fascinating how it all worked. Also, the greatest thing about making schedules is that I could do them during sacrament meetings, holding open the humongous Quad, making it look like I was reading the scriptures. Church and Sundays in general were a great time to work on the admin of my leagues.

Once the composite schedule was made, I played out the games in the backyard by myself. Now, you may ask to yourself, "Doesn't Kent have, like, 100 brothers? Why didn't he just play with them?" Well, I say to you, that playing by myself was always infinitely more fun than playing with my brothers. When you play by yourself, you have complete control of the outcome. If I played with my brothers, do you think I would've thrown for 500 yards a game and also somehow managed to have 200 rushing yards and even 200 receiving yards?

Now, the sports that were hardest to play by yourself were in the following order, from hardest to easiest:
1. Baseball
2. Football
3. Soccer
4. Tennis
5. Basketball

Baseball was hard because I just had to toss it up to myself, hit it, and then go shag it. That never really worked out.

Football was hard because I would go back to pass, throw the ball to an imaginary receiver, and then, depending on the quality of the throw, I would make an amazing catch approximately where the ball landed by tossing it up to a point and running to catch it. That actually got pretty fun, but also looked the most embarrassing. I always made sure that no older brothers or neighbors were around when I was playing football by myself.

Soccer was pretty easy, but there wasn't a whole lot of passing going on. Plus, it wasn't really that fun since I played so much real soccer.

Tennis was at a later age, around 10-13 years. It was easy because we had a cement patio with a brick wall that was just about net size that I could hit it against. I would design these elaborate tennis tournaments. I always loved the concept of double-elimination tourneys, but I felt they were lacking. So I designed these quadruple-elimination tournaments. During church, of course.

Basketball was the best sport to play by myself because I could play it in my room with the Nerf hoop or later downstairs on the Little Tykes hoop that my parents bought for my 3 year old brother, Ralph. That hoop was perfect because you could raise it to about 6 feet high and the ball was easy to dribble, unlike those Nerf hoops where you couldn't dribble at all, so you had to do the fake dribble where you held onto the ball but you motioned a dribble.

I found that playing the entire schedule of the Prophets League got a little tedious, especially because I couldn't be on every team, and where's the fun in that? So then I started thinking that I could make a league with all of these cities I found in the atlas that didn't have professional teams of any kind, but were still kind of big. This league featured about 60 teams from Canada, US, and Mexico, with a conference for each country and it was divided into like 12 divisions. The main reason I created this league was just for the fun of making an elaborate composite schedule during church--I had no intention of playing out these games. I think I killed a good 10 Sundays with that league.

One year, one of my brothers got a Sports Alamanac for Christmas, I think it was the 1988 edition. This was the BEST PRESENT EVER. This Almanac was like having ESPN.com in book form. Of course, this was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so we pretty much lived in that Almanac, studying all the stats and records from that year and years past. The greatest part about it was now I didn't have to rely on the newspaper to get a listing of all the obscure colleges and conferences, which worked wonders. This is when my leagues got so realistic, they almost mirrored the real leagues.

I decided that I wanted to have a whole career, where I worked my way up through the high school basketball ranks and signed on with the crappiest team ever and led them to an NCAA championship. So I looked through the Almanac, and narrowed down the crappy teams. The team I first decided to put myself on was Iowa State. Their 1988 basketball record was something like 1-29, and was one of the worst in Division 1 that year. So I put myself on their team, as a Freshman named Spike Hansen (I thought Spike was the coolest name of all time). I started as a no-name walk-on, who barely made the team that season as the 12th man. Finally, after losing the first 7 games by 30 points a game, Coach finally put me in during garbage time. We were down by 30 with 10 minutes left, but I hit 12 3's and had at least 4 dunks in traffic, scoring around 50 points and leading the team to its first victory in 36 games.

Of course, despite all of that, Coach refused to start me the next few games, not wanting to shake things up with his starting 5. This meant that we were always down 20 to 30 points when Coach would finally put me in, and I would come in and score 40-50 points each game to lead the team to victory. Finally, he swallowed his pride and started me, and our team never looked back, winning every single game for the rest of my college career.

Of course, I would always doctor most of the games to either be close games that went down to the wire, or a ridiculously obscene blowout, like 165-23 or something. I think I ended up averaging around 70 points a game by the end of the season, and we ended up winning it all for each of the 4 years I was there.

By the time I entered the NBA, I was the 1st round draft pick and played on the worst team, which I believe was the Clippers (still are). I probably averaged 70-80 points a game and broke every record (including assists and rebounds). I'm sure we won the title every year until I was retired. The only reason we ever lost a game is if I was injured or something. It was the greatest ever!

One day, I was telling my brothers, Kurt and Brian, that Iowa State had come back from a 30-point deficit to win the game. They were amazed, and wondered how I saw/heard about that game. When I realized that they thought it happened in real life, I had to clarify that it was in "my own league", which was shortened to "in mine." Only then did I discover that Kurt and Brian also had their own leagues going, each with a different plot line, albeit very similar to mine (averaging 70ish points a game, for example). I'm not sure theirs were ever as elaborate as mine, as they spent a lot of time playing Lakers vs. Celtics on the computer. So from then on, we had to differentiate amazing sports stories from real life from the ones "in mine".

For example:

"UConn was down by 16 points with 45 seconds to Clemson, but amazingly got a bunch of steals and hit 6 3-pointers and won the game! In Mine."

"In Mine, I scored 102 points in my best-ever game, as the Clippers beat the Knicks, 182-93."

Most of the "in mine" leagues happened in basketball, as the basketball season started in October (once it got dark after dinner) and went all the way until June. Then I would play Tennis for a few months in the summer, and football would start in August. The tennis In Mine and football In Mine weren't nearly as elaborate or ridiculous as the basketball In Mine.

The funniest thing about In Mine was that I continued to have make-believe leagues and tournaments all the way until I was a Senior in college. I just wouldn't tell anybody about it, but I've still got a pretty vivid imagination.

The riskiest part about playing basketball outside in the driveway was my arch-nemesis and next-door neighbor, Chris Goodwin. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his front driveway belching and doing who-knows-what. He was a pretty big kid, and also 4 years older than me, and delighted in making fun of younger kids, so therefore I hated him and was deathly afraid of him. When I went out to play, I couldn't make too many loud announcer or crowd noises, else he might hear and mock me to no end. The worst was when I thought I was safe outside, got wrapped up in a particularly exciting game, and then turned around to see Chris mocking me. I hated it!

I'm pretty sure that when we get a basketball hoop in our driveway, In Mine will resume. Maybe I'll buy a Little Tykes hoop for my kid and pretend that I got it for him. Mel will know where to find me in the winter: Downstairs, averaging 70 a game, dominating my opponents. In Mine.

Pregnancy thoughts...by Kent

Not a whole lot has been going on around here. We're preparing for the baby by painting the nursery (Mel), having showers (Mel), putting together furniture (Mel), and watching football (me). The nursery is pretty much good to go, although we're still missing a few things like a bassinet, a TV ala Fred Savage's room in "Princess Bride", and a baby. I'm not sure we'll get the TV, but we will DEFINITELY get RBI Baseball. Maybe we'll get a baby, but I'm not sure we can fit it in the room.

Putting together the crib and changing table was easy enough. I do remember some new parents sharing with me their frustrations in putting together those things, so I was dreading it. Turned out that Mel had no trouble at all.

All I know now is that our kid who isn't even ALIVE and hasn't done JACK to deserve all of this brand new stuff has more stuff than me. The nursery is packed with new books, clothes, diapers, bottles, and furniture. I need to have a "Kent Shower" so I can start catching up to my boy.

In the meantime, Mel pretends she's not pregnant by living her life as normal, making meals, doing dishes, and hanging pictures, making me look bad. Burly Steve and wife just had a baby and Steve literally did everything short of going to the bathroom for her. I don't do that much because I don't want to keep Mel from progressing. Who am I to deny her a ticket to the Celestial kingdom all because she has something growing inside of her? (Mel! Make me a sandwich! I have a mild headache!)

Mel spends most of her free time surfing the net looking at cute baby stuff and learning all of the gross parts of the female anatomy and reading all about the process of delivery. She's really into this baby stuff. I pretend not to be bored by it all, but our conversations are like this:

"This week, our baby is developing his lower kneecap!"
"I don't think the Cardinals have what it takes to win the World Series this year."
"My friend said that at 36 weeks she could barely walk, and then she complained about her ankles."
"The thing about hooking up the 240 volt heaters is that I have to buy a ganged circuit, and I don't think we have the space on the panel for it."
"I read today that the chances of having an autistic kid are going up."
"I'm pumped that the grass is really starting to fill in."

Of course, I'm joking (sort of). I'm stoked to have a kid, but I know it's going to be really tiring watching Mel take care of it (stolen joke-name that comedian!). Everybody I know, including you, has been telling me how tired I will be and how everything changes and so on. I know all of this is true, but couldn't we just talk about sports? I don't need to discuss this non-stop, that's what the wife is for. She eats this stuff up, she could talk for hours about the most mundane things, like the baby's sleeping schedule. I'm sure I'll talk about these things soon enough, but for crying out loud let's talk about something else while I can.

In other news, it's getting cold. This is good because Mel has been burning up lately. It gets down to about 60 degrees in our room at night so I put on my flannelest pajamas, crank up the mattress pad heater on my side, pull the covers up over my head and try to survive til morning. When I wake up, I notice that Mel is lying without any covers, sweating buckets. It's working out nicely.

There haven't been nearly as many creepos rubbing my wife's belly as I thought. There's a few people that I wanted to say something to, like, "I'm sorry, we don't like you enough to allow you to do that. What did you give us at the shower again? Oh, I'm sorry, onesies don't qualify for belly rubbing. We have a 20 dollar limit. Better luck next time."

Mel continues to be the envy of her coworkers and ward members, as they think she just swallowed a pumpkin. She hasn't really gained much weight except for at the belly. I also look great, but nobody says anything to me. I don't get near as much attention as I deserve. I think this has less to do with Mel being pregnant and more to do with me being a jerk.

MAJOR catch up

Editor's note: Because Mel started this post a month ago, I had to take it over or it would've never been posted. My comments are in italics.

As Kent mentioned, the two of us have been neglecting this blog lately, but in way of an excuse we have been keeping very busy. Summertime is definitely not a "kick back and relax" time for us, at least not this year. Or last year. Or the year before that.

The week of July 4th Kent's dad happened to be in Providence for a work conference, so we picked him up and he spent the weekend with us. We gave him the "Melanie & Kent" tour of Boston, showing him the places we visit on a regular basis. Then for the big holiday we went down to Cape Cod for dinner and a Summer League baseball game. We had thought they would supply fireworks after the game, but it ran into extra innings and we were all too tired to stick around. We did happen to catch some on the drive home. There were no postable pics from his visit, probably because he doesn't fit in the camera.

For the second weekend in July, I had the Young Women come over and camp out in our backyard as a pre-camp sleepover. They seemed to have some fun. Probably the best was when Kent snuck up behind 3 of the girls sitting around the fire pit and jumped out at them. I don't think I've ever seen people jump that high or that fast. A couple of them almost landed in the fire, so maybe not the safest choice, but hilarious nonetheless. I also had to take off my flips so I could sneak up on them, and ended up stepping on a hot coal, which hurt like the dickens and caused me to walk funny through scout camp and the reunion. Still worth it.

The following week Kent spent a few days at Scout Camp. It wasn't too far away from our house, so he was able to come home every night so I wasn't left completely alone. Scout camp was full of regulations. You couldn't have a fire without permission from the camp director, lights were out at 10 pm (no late night tomfoolery), etc. Those were the only 2 things I liked about scout camp: staying up late and having fires!

Then the last week in July we headed out to Utah for the Hansen Family Reunion. The flight out was fairly uneventful, and when we arrived in Orem we had a BIG surprise for Kent's family.

Our week in Utah was pretty exciting, it was nice to be able to see all the members of the Hansen Herd all in one place. There are SO many kids, it's kind of amazing. Meal time at the reunion was quite the production. Especially when the power goes out while you're cooking assembly-line style with an electric stove and oven...but everyone got fed, I think. After a pretty wet June in Boston, it was almost amazing how consistent the weather was everyday in Utah: dry and sunny during the day with a temperature cool down at night.

Craig's kids getting front row seats for the spectacle that is the Hansen Family Talent Show

Mom looking weary and Bruce looking surprisingly cheerful

Holly holding Lucy, Paula, and Alice with Chuckles

Chuckles!!!

Lana the duck for the Bruces' talent

Max (token black kid) inserted himself in every talent

Oh look! It's Max again! Also, it turns out that Gary CAN fit in the camera

Hurling their challenge to the foe...

About 10 years ago, Brian and Craig came up with these "Air Sports" sketches where they would mimic sports and events in exaggerated form, and in a close space. It's hilarious. Previous mimicries included Baseball, Basketball, the 200m dash, and I know I'm missing others. Anyway, this year Craig had the idea to do a football one. With limited people (me, Kurt, Brian, Craig), you have to play multiple positions. I won't explain the whole thing, but it was a ridiculous option play, involving about 5 pitches going back and forth across the "field". At the end, Brian broke all of the tackles and went into the end zone. I wish I had a video of it, pictures don't do it justice (don't you have a video of it, Heidi?):

Brian as the QB, Kurt the RB, I'm the center, Craig the entire defense (for now)

This was the super slo-mo part of the skit, Kurt and Craig trying to bring Brian down, while I catch up to anticipate the pitch (which didn't come, as Brian wanted to selfishly score himself). Oh, and there's an imaginary ball.

The Bergeson boys rockin out

Chuckles wowing all with his rendition of "Linus and Lucy". Move over, Mozart!

We knew we couldn't compete with the various comedy sketches and numbers, so we appealed to the sensitive side by singing a stirring rendition of "Lucky" by Jason Mraz. Mel nailed it. And hated every second of it.

The female cousins performed a very entertaining and confusing fairy tale, which I am unsure how it ended.

Undokai

Mel showing off her wheels in the bubble-blowing relay. Maw is taking her time blowing her bubble. This is what I get for being too lazy to post the pictures myself...I'm really not that fat, I swear.

The water pouring relay. We took second place, but Paula was cheating, so we would've won.

Scott hurling Thys in the Toddler Toss. He threw him 50 yards and won the gold medal. Thys escaped with minor injuries, if you count a broken femur as minor. The real story: we chose Super Scott to do the Firemen's Relay. He had to carry 4 different team members to safety using 4 different carrying methods - he is truly impressive. I did not participate in this event for obvious reasons.

Maw giving her best effort in the javelin. The javelin is currently orbiting the earth.

Mel in the Croquet hit competition. She lost badly, but for the sake of this post, let's just say she won.

Scott is neck and neck with Thys (broken femur and all!) in the headstand competition. Thys won, getting Scott back for his Toddler Toss. But since they were both on our team we earned MAJOR points in this event.

More Chuckles and Max (above)

I also got to see my little sister, April, whom I haven't seen since our wedding two years ago. Thanks so much for making the drive down April! Hopefully I'll get to see you again soon.

And naturally Max had to insert himself in the photo-op.

We also got to spend some time with the Sam Palmers (including the infamous Turkey Sub) while they passed through Utah on their grand move to the midwest.

Does anyone else see "Christmas Card" with this photo? It's just too cute.

Our trip back home was a little more stressful, what with delays in Dallas, waiting for the bus at Logan, oh yeah, and Kent leaving his wallet at his sister's house that morning. I don't think Kent has EVER left the house without his wallet, but he manages to do it on the day we have a 6am flight with a pretty tight layover and a train schedule to meet in order to make it home at a decent hour. Luckily Paula married Super Scott who, against all odds, managed to drive to the airport and bring Kent's wallet, just in time, to save the day. Thanks, Scott! My bad!

The second week in August I spent up in New Hampshire at Girls' Camp. A few people thought I was crazy for going, but it really wasn't all that bad. A little hot and humid at times, but nothing a bottle of water and some time in front of a fan couldn't fix. I had fun being with the girls and am glad that I stuck it out and went. Kent was very brave, staying at home all by himself for the whole week and I'm happy he was able to survive. I subsisted on grasshoppers, honey, and frozen pizzas.

I was over the 4th year girls, and out here they are responsible for choreographing and performing a light show for the rest of camp. They worked really hard on it and it turned out so well. I was really proud of all the girls.

After an eventful few weeks we don't have any major travel plans in the coming months which is nice. Although we do have plenty of work to do around here...

Frame job

I'm not sure how interesting people will find this post, but I won't mind if you just skip it. There are no people in these pictures, just lots of basement and lots of wood. I will give a good chunk of details, mostly for my own record keeping so I can remember what it looked like before I put the drywall up. I'll probably consult this post whenever I need to find a stud.

Anyway, ever since we bought this house I wanted to finish the basement. Now, I have zero construction experience, just small, odd jobs here and there and nothing using major power tools that can maim/kill you if mishandled. When I was in college, my mom had me redo a couple of the bathrooms in the house and I learned quite a lot by doing that. I look back at my work, and boy did it suck. I've also learned that most anybody can do this if they take their time and have the right tools.

I'm also not sure how to display this in any way that makes sense, but I'll do my best.

The Stairs


Looking down, pre-construction. You will notice the vapor barrier I've installed along the wall, and the floor plates which I put into the cement using a Ramset, which is a powder charged nailgun, using .22 bullets. It was pretty fun, and loud.
Anyway, we decided to take out the left wall along the stairs to open it up a little more. That was pretty fun, as I took the circular saw and just cut along the joist. So much dust kicked up from the drywall that it caused all of the smoke detectors to go off.

Here's a view of the wall that we took out. Don't use the couch as a point of reference, as I moved it a few times.


And, voila! The wall is gone. I think it really opened up the downstairs.
You can also notice all of the framing I put up next to the stairs. With the huge discharge pipe in the middle, it made it a tremendous pain. That took me a few days.
Here's a closeup of the stairs.

Here's the door frame leading to what will be the laundry/storage room.

Here is what will be the hallway leading from the stairs to the family room. You'll notice this is before I took out the wall.
This is actually looking from the bottom of the stairs down the hall, through the door and into the family room. The door in the picture leads to the outside, a steel exterior door. Burly Steve helped me put that in a few months ago.


Here's the family room, looking left from the outside door. This is the best pic I got pre-construction.
Starting framing

Finishing my first wall, framing around the window.

Second wall
I had to build a soffit (the box in the corner) to hide the various pipes. We'll have to put in a drop ceiling because of all the pipes/ducts.Looking through the bathroom door into the room.

The south wallWhere the couch sits is where the bathroom will be, but that won't be in this project.



I decided to frame underneath the stairs so that the little ones can play under there without boppin their heads on the steps.


My original goal was to have the basement framed out by the end of Spring 2010. However, I got the bug and enjoyed it so much that I just went down there every chance I could.

Next step: Wiring the basement!