"Lost" marathon

D and I have been watching "Lost" since the beginning. For the past few seasons, we've been watching it with a small group of friends, waiting three or four weeks between viewings and then blowing through all of the saved episodes in one night.

We knew the finale was coming up on Sunday night, but due to various scheduling conflicts, our group was still four episodes behind. I was afraid we'd get spoiled if we didn't watch the finale immediately, so I talked our friend into hosting a Lost marathon, starting at 3pm, interspersed with some board games and BBQ (mmm, rack of lamb), and ending with the finale.

There was a minor catch in the plan; we were planning to watch in Sunnyvale (near Wolfe & 280), and I'd promised a friend that I'd pick him up at SFO around 8pm. Since we were watching the show by downloading the episodes rather than with a DVR, our choices were to watch the finale in real-time, or to wait until the East Coast feed was done and then hope that a copy got uploaded really quickly.

The flight that I was waiting for landed at 7:27pm, seven minutes late. At that time, we were wrapping up the fourth saved episode. We finished it about ten minutes later, and I was out the door and onto 280 by a little after 7:45pm. The pickup at SFO went smoothly; my friend beat me to the international arrivals area by five minutes, and from there I took him back to his place in Redwood Shores. Unfortunately that meant that I had to come back down 101, which was a bit more congested, but by the time I hit the 85 interchange I realized I had a good chance of getting back in time for the start of the 9:00pm finale. After merging onto 280, I called my friends to let them know we should go with the real-time plan, and a few minutes later, I walked in the door at 9:03pm. 80 miles in 75 minutes = fun. Whee!

The only downside was that it turned out that watching the finale in real-time was excruciating, due to the frequent and lengthy commercial breaks. I'm not used to watching commercials at all, let alone 45 minutes of them.