HondaReport.com - Sunday R & R

It's Sunday, which means different things for different people. A cloudy morning may set your mood off-kilter, but to me, it's a reprieve from the ruthless heat of summer.

Time for a little R & R on this blessed Sunday, even for those of us who have odd hobbies, like collecting dust.

Yeah, right. Sunday is often one of the busiest workdays of the week for me. Just the nature of the job. A regular Monday-through-Friday 9-to-fiver has it pretty good, getting Saturdays and Sundays completely off. No phone calls from the boss. Just time for the wife, the kids, the family. It's a good gig, just the way life was designed, more or less.

Me? The morning begins with score collection, links to stories near and far about games, sending out the info to our weekly pollsters. One of the good things about the place I'm at now is, there are no curtains, not even the thingamajig that you hang curtains from. By 7 a.m. every day, the sunlight beams through and that, my friends, is nature's alarm clock. Give me a hotel room with great air conditioning and dark curtains, and I could sleep in until 10 every morning.

Sunday, bloody Sunday. Feature story interviews. More scores to collect (volleyball in the fall season). More info to send out. Win-loss records to update. The least monotonous part of the morning is figuring out my own ballot. I always have this internal debate of who I'm ranking and where. Sure, my ballot is worth only a fraction of the poll, but I work on it the way my mom used to sew us homemade aloha shirts. Meticulously. Laboriously. With the least amount of excess stitching.

Saint Louis looked quite impressive last night. From what I hear, Kamehameha was outstanding, played its bench in the second half of a win over Aiea. Mililani struggled with Iolani, but then again, the Raiders are quite solid. Possibilities for change. Baldwin played well on both sides of the ball and quelled any doubters with a huge win over archrival Maui.

I wonder, there are some consistently successful Division II programs out there, like Kauai, but they don't belong on my ballot. Not just yet, anyway. If there were more time, I'd love to start a D-II Top 10 football poll. There are just a couple dozen teams that are in that category, but it sure would be fun.

By early afternoon, I'm hoping the feature interview is pau so I can concentrate on other things, like volleyball preview stories. If I don't finish writing the feature story (due tomorrow), I store it away until tonight. Then I start adding the incoming ballots up. Thank God for Excel spreadsheet. By 3 p.m., the voting closes and my story is ready to be written following a phone call or two. It's fun stuff, dealing with numbers and talking with coaches just 24 (or 48) hours after a big win or defeat.

By 5, the poll and story are usually done, if not earlier. Helps to give the office staff a nice cushion of time to handle the stuff I send in, and it frees me up to get more stuff done. Sometimes, if there's a few hours to kill and there's no work left (particularly in the summer), it's movie time. But it's late August and there's no time for afternoon fun. If everything lines up nicely, I'll be done by 9 p.m., maybe 8 because I won't call a coach beyond that hour.

Last thing I need is for people with normal hours — coaches' wives, not coaches — to be pissed off at me for interrupting a peaceful day of rest. I know the feeling of a cellphone that won't be silent, so I try to give coaches their much-needed peace.

Yes, coaches need a little R & R, somewhere between the games, practices and staff meetings, but on Sundays, their workaholic tendencies come in handy. Working Sundays are nice for those of us who relish a quieter atmosphere. All the better and easier to concentrate.

Getting that one day of rest — a sabbath day, 24 hours of uninterrupted existence — well, that's something some of us need to work on.