November 3, 2018 started off like any other normal Saturday in the Fall. At 6:54 am an overgrown and over enthusiastic Goldendoodle dropped a deflated football on my head.  This was my cue to roll out of bed, stumble downstairs without my contact lenses in, and open the back door so that the Doodle could roll around in piles of leaves and relieve herself.  While she was outside, I opened my fridge and took out a gallon of milk (expiration date November 1, 2018, phew it’s safe) to pour myself a bowl of cereal. If I’m being honest with myself, I also briefly considered opening a Sam Oktoberfest, but the clock on my microwave said 7:04 am, and this made me think twice about “starting too early.”  My inner guilt trip was quickly interrupted by BARK! BARK! at the back door. As any well-trained dog owner would do, I immediately responded to the commands of my dog and let her back inside so that she could sprint full speed up the staircase and jump back into bed with Melanie. Saturday November 3, 2018 had officially begun. 

Rather than waking up Melanie, I laid on the couch in our living room and put on ESPN.  It was now 7:15 am and I had an hour and forty-five minutes of pre-College Gameday coverage to watch before the start of College GameDay at 9:00 am.  This week’s location for GameDay was Baton Rouge, LA for the Alabama @ LSU game. College Gameday is my and Melanie’s favorite show on TV. In fact, Melanie and I have been featured on the show twice over the last 5 years.  Once in Tuscaloosa and a second time in Atlanta. We are die-hard College Football fans, to say the least. As proof of this statement: Melanie and I got married on November 23, 2013, and each year for our anniversary we have road-tripped to a major college football game.  Year 1: Knoxville, TN for Alabama @ Tennessee. Year 2: Tuscaloosa, AL for Alabama vs. LSU. Year 3: South Bend, IN for Notre Dame vs. Virginia Tech. Year 4: Atlanta, GA for Alabama vs. Florida State. We even chose November 23, 2013 as the date of our wedding because it was week 11 of the College Football season, otherwise known as “cupcake weekend,” when there are no games worth watching. I’ll just end this paragraph with the obvious statement: I’m a lucky guy.

Like I said before, this Saturday morning was no different than most Saturdays in the Fall.  The one *small caveat was that this was the day that Melanie gave birth to our first child. The child that we endearingly referred to as “Emmy” (short for Embryo baby) for 9 months arrived just in time for a classic football game.

Dear Reader: If you have any eye for detail, then you’ve probably been asking yourself: How is this blog post about the future? (And no, I didn’t build a time machine out of a Delorean). To address your question, I would say that modern physics (and the late Stephen Hawking) believed that time travel into the future was absolutely possible if a person was able to travel at the speed of light (the theory being that time, as a relative concept, moves more slowly the faster someone travels).  For example, the “twin paradox” is a thought experiment where there are two identical twins and one twin travels into space on a high-speed rocket and returns back to earth while the other twin remains on earth. When the “rocket man” twin returns home, he or she will find their “terrestrial twin” to be older. Therefore, the “rocket man” twin who is technically younger than the “terrestrial twin” has returned to earth at a time in the future based on their relative ages. Interesting stuff! 

But to get back to my point: When I found out that Melanie was pregnant (on February 27, 2018), all I could think of was travelling into the future to the day when she is due: November 3, 2018.  I want to travel to the future so that I can meet our “Emmy” and he or she can watch some great college football with us. I’m also happy that physics believes that it is impossible to travel back in time, because that means Melanie and I can officially put the past three years behind us and hopefully create a great future together as a family.

For anyone reading into this post and thinking that my “twin paradox” example was a hint that we are having twins: the answer to that question is “no.”  I gave that example just because I am a nerd! (Plus all this space-time continuum and time travel talk really freaks Melanie out!)