Called For Traveling

TigerBlog has a show to recommend to you.

It's called "Offspring." It's on Netflix. There are seven seasons worth.

It's an Australian show, set in Melbourne, centered around the Proudman family. There's Darcy, the father, and Geraldine, the mother, and their grown kids Billie, Nina and Jimmy.

It's a great show. There's a nice balance between humor and seriousness, and the characters are well-developed so that nothing ever seems to be contrived. Maybe the closest show he can compare it to is "Parenthood," but "Offspring" is better.

TB has recommended it to a few people, and everyone he has told about it has loved it.

You can include in that group Ford Family Director of Athletics Mollie Marcoux Samaan, by the way. 

TB reached the end of the seventh season last week. Since then, he's looked for something new, and he thinks he's found it. He's finally going to watch "Game of Thrones" to see what all the fuss is about. He's made it to Episode 4 of Season 1 so far.

That's your TV update for now. 

Just check out "Offspring." You'll be glad. 

TigerBlog has never been to Australia. He'd love to be there one day; he's just not sure he wants to spend that much time on an airplane to fly there.

If you've made that trip, is it just brutal?

TB does get to work with an Australian. His colleague Elliott Carr is from Down Under (TB will have to ask him what native Australians think of that term), which gives him the honor of being both the first Aussie in the Office of Athletic Communications and at around 6-6 or so also the tallest person ever to work in the office. 

The first OAC Zoom call of the new year happened Tuesday afternoon. There was business to discuss, but as always, there was plenty of time for catching up and just seeing where the conversation went.

One direction it went to was the Giants-Eagles game from the other night. TB works with a serious Philadelphia sports fan, one Warren Croxton. He's serious. Very, very serious. 

At one point during the call, TB had to remind Warren that his beloved Eagles had recently won the only Super Bowl in franchise history and that Warren is obsessed with "41-33," the final score of that game.

Another subject was traveling with the various teams.

There have been a lot of great parts of working at Princeton through the years for TigerBlog. The best one, obviously, has been the opportunity to work with such great young people, to see them mature during their time at Princeton and then to hear from them as they go down the paths of their careers.

Some of the other top things? Working with the coaches TB has had the chance to work with, of course. 

And the winning. That's always fun. 

Somewhere up there, though, you can add the travel. 

Working at Princeton has given TB a chance to travel the country and the world, for that matter, often going to places that he otherwise never might have had the chance to see, explore and learn about. 

He's mentioned this many times before, but he's seen Princeton teams compete in eight different time zones. There have been the four in the Continental United States, as well as Hawaii, the Atlantic time zone when Princeton played a men's basketball game against Ohio in Nova Scotia and then two different European time zones, where he saw the men's lacrosse team play on international trips (granted those games were only exhibitions).

When he was the men's basketball contact, he used to love to check the schedule as it came out, or as it was being put together, to see what new places he would be going to that coming season. As he said on the OAC call the other day, that includes two separate trips to Iowa State and one to Green Bay, including leaving the hotel in the Lambeau Field parking lot early on the Sunday morning of a home game for the Packers and seeing how jammed it already was, even on a cold December morning.

There have been a bunch of other places. Milwaukee. East Lansing. Champaign, Ill. Indianapolis. Muncie, also in Indiana. New Orleans twice. El Paso. Fresno. Lawrence, Kansas. And so many others - including Honolulu and Miami.

And that was just men's basketball. One of his favorite spots of all was Lafayette, Louisiana, with the baseball team for an NCAA regional.

Each of those trips has a story, and not just because of the games. TB remembers them all, mostly for the hospitality of the people he'd meet along the way. 

These days, when he sees one of those venues on TV, he can't help but smile at the memories.

Like he said, he's been lucky to be here for as long as he has, and there have been a lot of great aspects to working here.

The travel? That's been a lot of fun.