In Which Something Pleases Me

It may surprise a few of you to know that I love to watch professional (U.S.) football. Considering my feelings about Philadelphia, it may also surprise some of you to know that I am a big fan of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Well, last night, the Eagles upset the Miami Dolphins in Miami. This improves their record to 11-3, with two comparatively easy games remaining. They thus have a good chance to play all of their playoff games at home, which would be a nice advantage. All this makes me happy.

What makes this even more personal to me is that I participate in a football pool. (Showing once again how my life is based on odd connections, the pool is run by people in the office building where Lauren used to work.) The Eagles' upset victory means that I picked 15 of last week's 16 games correctly, which may be enough to win this week's prize and probably puts me in third place overall. It's an expensive pool, which means that the prizes are fairly large.

Things Only I Really Care About

Here are the theories circulating about the delays in getting the test results out:

1. The Patent Office (PTO) is in the middle of moving to a new building, papers have been misplaced, and processes are disrupted.
2. There were a great many questions on subjects that have not been tested in the past. The internal review of test results exposed flaws in many of the new questions, so the PTO must now spend a lot of time reviewing the questions and deciding which ones to throw out.
3. The PTO suspects cheating on a large scale.
4. The delay is somehow connected to the PTO's plans to switch to an entirely new test format in the spring.
5. The PTO is being willfully annoying.