It will forever be hilarious to me that Jerry Wayne spent over a billion dollars to create the only football gridiron on the planet with an East-West orientation. Now, he’s tripling down on the end zone windows, claiming that it provides a home field advantage for his team. Evan Grant crunched the numbers and is reporting that the Cowboys are 29-29 in all games at AT&T Stadium that start between 3-7p. The team is 107-68 in home games that start at 12noon or evening prime time. It’s not the only thing preventing the Cowboys from winning a divisional playoff game for now the 29th year in a row. But this week it is the most glaring of hundreds of things Jerry does to get in the way of his team.

In other news, watching the Cowboys this season is reminding lots of people about the ’89 team that went 1-15, the Campo years with Quincy Carter, Anthony Wright, and Chad Hutchinson, and even the 1960 expansion team that didn’t have the benefit of an NFL draft. The numbers are historically bad. We are watching one of the worst Dallas Cowboys teams of all time. And, yes, one of the worst NFL teams of all time. This version of the Cowboys is the first team in NFL history to trail by over 20 points in five straight home games. That record should be extended against Houston on Monday.

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Carrie-Anne and I spent five days in Los Angeles recently so a world-renowned surgeon could operate on a sinus/septum issue that’s been causing her problems for much of her life. It’s a one centimeter hole on the inside of her tiny nose that has led to a lifetime of migraine headaches and sinus infections. There’s a guy in Houston who fixes these by cutting across the bottom of the nose, pulling all the skin up toward the forehead, and knocking it out in about an hour. Yikes. This guy in L.A. goes in through the nostrils and takes more than five hours to, in his words, carefully build the ship inside the bottle, with tiny instruments and cameras.

After the pre-op appointment Thursday afternoon, C-A and I ate dinner at the iconic Mel’s Drive-In on Hollywood Boulevard and then that was pretty much it for the next four days. They wheeled her back for the surgery at 8a Friday morning and we didn’t leave until after 5p. And she was absolutely miserable. Super sore. Swollen. Groggy. A little discolored. And absolutely not wanting to leave our hotel room for anything.

So, yes, we spent the whole weekend watching football and movies in the Hampton Inn in L.A., less than five miles from Hollywood and the Sunset Strip and less than 10 miles from the beach.

Thankfully, her follow up appointment was Monday morning. Dr. Hamilton pulled the packing out of her nose and nasal passages–about three miles of gauze that I thought never would stop coming–and checked her out and gave us some care and maintenance instructions and sent us on our way. Carrie-Anne still didn’t feel great, but she was good enough for us to drive up and down about twelve miles of the Pacific Coast Highway and eat lunch at Duke’s on the beach in Malibu. A long, wonderful, relaxing lunch. Coconut shrimp and fried fish, while watching the pelicans dive and the dolphins jump out on the sea. I don’t think C-A actually tasted any of her food, but we had a blast.

We got home Tuesday night and today Carrie-Anne is still a little swollen, still very sore, and still unable to breathe through her nose. There’s a protective foam packing inside her little nose that’s supposed to come out tomorrow. They gave her a solution to spray up there that’s supposed to dissolve the foam and pretty much take care of itself. We’re very hopeful. The suspense is killing us.

The good news is that her follow-up in L.A. is December 5 and we’re planning to spend three full days doing the touristy stuff we couldn’t do this time. We won’t go back to Mel’s–I think a person only does that once. But we’ll hit the Hollywood Walk of Fame, cruise up and down Sunset Strip, maybe take in a show, see if Jimmy Kimmel’s taping one of those afternoons, and go back to the beach. In our sweatshirts, probably. And we’ll certainly go back to Duke’s. Carrie-Anne will be able to taste her fish then. And she’ll let me take pictures.

Peace,

Allan