Bracketology: my picks

March 17, 2016March 17, 2016 ~ Meg ~ 37 Comments

So I filled out 5 brackets, not 14! I have several methods for selecting my teams and here’s how it goes:

1. The automatic picks – all the higher ranked teams are auto selected. This bracket is called Meg Wings It.

Here is the final four: Kansas, Oregon, UNC and Virginia with Oregon winning it all.

2. The selections of my heart – the teams I’m rooting for like my hometown 3: Villanova, Temple and St. Joe’s. This bracket is Meg Pens a Win.

My final four: Villanova, Baylor, UNC, Michigan St. with Villanova winning it all.

3. & 4. The scientific brackets – I do my homework, carefully analyze possible upsets, listen to the experts and decide. These are Meg Authors a Win and Meg Writes a Win, respectively.

Two sets of final four:

Kansas, Oregon, UNC, Michigan St. With Michigan St. Winning the final

Kansas, Oklahoma, UNC, Michigan St. With UNC winning the final.

5. A fun bracket! Thanks to Deb of once upon a hot flash for this suggestion: choose the team based on their location and which place you’d rather live! Called it Meg Goes With D.

Fun final four: Colorado, Oregon, USC, Utah and Oregon takes the win!

I’ve entered these five into three bracket challenges so if you want to check them out, I’m in The Capitol One Visa, NCAA March Madness 2016 and the ESPN Sports center challenges!

The command center:

Happy “Madness” everyone!

March 16, 2016March 16, 2016 ~ Meg ~ 46 Comments

It’s true. I’m one of those people. One of the thousands of fans who get absolutely nothing done for the next couple weeks while the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is on. I’m a calculator who hedges her bets by filling out 14 brackets and entering them all over the place. An obsessive stat keeper whose WiFi has barely enough bandwidth to run 2 TVs and 2 streaming feeds so that all the opening round games are on at once. (I’m exaggerating, I have awesome WiFi.) The competitor who needs her phone and her iPad to trash talk with her friends in other parts of the country. The girl who has a crush on Jay Wright, the coach from Villanova. (Tall, dark and handsome! Am I right?)

It started last night with “The First Four” and will culminate April 4th with the National Championship. Throughout this time, I will be in the throes of March Madness. The best part? Three Philly area teams to root for! Besides Villanova, Temple and St. Joe’s are in as well! There’s a chance Nova and Temple will face each other in the second round. I know, I know… No one thinks any of these teams has a shot to go the distance -it’ll probably be North Carolina or Kansas- but I can dream! The East Regional games are being played here at the Wells Fargo Center in Philly. I’m trying to convince my non-basketball fan husband to go. (It’s not working.) In any case, I thought I’d let you know, in case I forget to blog for the next couple weeks. I’m not dead or incapacitated, just happily distracted!

I’ll be posting my picks later today so you can see my skill at bracketology! I promise to limit my post to the best of the 14 or so brackets I fill out once I have studied, analyzed and obsessed for a while…. Anybody else out there totally off the charts excited like me? And if you are, WHO YA GOT?!?

Fairy Trees and Folk Tales

March 3, 2016August 6, 2025 ~ Meg ~ 38 Comments

From 2014, this is the first piece of any length I wrote on my blog. It’s the story of fairy trees in Ireland. Little “sister” here it is!

I’m in Ireland this week. My husband is here for work and I tagged along. Now this is actually my third time here in the area of Galway so I’ve come to feel pretty comfortable here. I can even give people directions if it’s to one of the major sights. I’ve heard many a fairy tale in three trips and I heard a story yesterday that I just had to share.

The Irish believe in fairies and fairy trees. A fairy tree is a hawthorn tree, of which there are two varieties: white or flowering hawthorns, and black, which do not flower. To determine if a hawthorn tree is a fairy tree, you must break off a branch and strip away the bark. If there is a pink stripe along the grain of wood, then it is a fairy tree. If it is, beware! Do no harm to the tree! However, legend has it that if you are ill, you can ask the fairy tree to heal your sickness and tie a bit of your clothing to the tree. By the time the cloth has disintegrated on the tree, your illness will have disappeared. (I imagine this would be waste of time for something minor like a cold!)

The story goes like this. The Irish highway department was recently building a new motorway from Dublin to Galway and as they were digging the road bed, they came across a hawthorn tree. Every time the bulldozing machine got near to the tree, the motor would conk out. They brought in the mechanic and he could find nothing wrong. Nevertheless they did some maintenance to the machine, filled it with petrol and oil, changed the battery, and so forth. Once again they started to dig in the area of the tree and once again it conked out. This happened over and over until finally they brought in a whole new machine from a different part of the road project. What do you think happened? Yep, the machine conked out!

The next step was to cut the tree down, so they brought in a man with a chainsaw to cut the tree down but as soon as he put the saw to the tree, the chain broke. The same thing happened with a second saw. Finally, they tried using hand saws to cut down the tree but when the men got close to the tree with their saws, they were thrown back from the tree! So if you’re traveling from Galway back to Dublin, you’ll find a slight right bend in the road. And if you look to the left of the road, you’ll see the fairy tree. That’s right, they moved the whole motorway around the fairy tree! Only in Ireland!