• Hello Again

    I don’t know how to feel about Lance Armstrong’s return. I tend to want my retired athletic heroes to stay retired. Call me old fashioned. But, I read an article during this summer’s Brett Favre drama that convinced me that the whole idea of legacy and pleasing the fans is a little silly. Each athlete should do what makes him…

  • And They’re Off

    Four hours of sweet freedom. That’s what we got today with the girls both going off to school. What a strange thing to have a completely quiet house in the middle of the day. I had to shut off my music junkie switch for awhile so I could enjoy this rare time of no noise. C. did great at school.…

  • Kid Talk

    In honor of M. starting school Wednesday, here are some stories about the kids. As promised, I will now reveal the curse word that C. has been using from time-to-time. When I drop something, knock something over, etc. my default curse is “Dammit.” I’ve learned to more mutter it than exclaim it since becoming a father, so I say it…

  • Holiday Perfection

    Admit it, you were glued to VH1 Classic’s 80 Hours of the ’80s this weekend (That is if you have VH1 Classic). Lord knows I was. I thought about e-mailing each of you individually to make sure you knew it was on. In between shows for the kids and doing things outside, I tried to check in on the A-Z…

  • Whoa

    Something very disappointing happened while my attentions were dominated by the Olympics: the Royals completely went into the tank. It wasn’t that long ago that they had a four game lead on the Indians for fourth place, and Detroit wasn’t too far ahead in third. Keep things going, and there was a chance for 75 wins and a third place…

  • Olympic Wrap Up

    Sigh. The Olympics are over. What the hell do I do now? Actually, the Olympics didn’t dominate my time this year the way they did four years ago. But I had a two-week-old baby then and we just kind of sat on the couch for about 20 hours a day anyway. That year, the Olympics were a God-send. This year,…

  • Usain In the Membrane

    Usain in the brain! Sweet baby Jesus. As I said earlier, my favorite run ever was Michael Johnson’s 200M world record in Atlanta. Second, before this week, was the 4×100 relay in 1992, when the U.S. destroyed the field, Carl Lewis ran away and hid, and Dennis Mitchell went nuts after he handed off to Lewis.* Bolt’s two world records…

  • Mini-Olympic Notebook

    Trying to keep these things shorter. I’ve never been a gymnastics guy, and this year has reinforced the wisdom of that decision. Not that I understood the scoring before, but it’s even worse this year. I’ll be the one millionth person to ask, how can you fall down on your dismount and still win a gold medal? My favorite technical…

  • Olympics Notebook

    I’ll try to do these more often this week, to avoid 1000+ words of rambling. I forgot to mention in my first Olympics Notebook that I’m thrilled with NBC’s coverage in one big way: we have five channels of high definition coverage. S. laughed at me on the night of the opening ceremonies when I got terribly excited when I…

  • Getting Ready

    With seven weeks to go, we’re finally cranking up the baby preparations. Of course, when you already have two girls, there isn’t that much original preparation to do. We moved the crib back up to newborn level today. We moved all of C.’s clothes out of that room and into her current room as well. Sometime this week, we’ll start…