I should have known it was going to be a bad football weekend when, while watching some NBA action Friday, I noticed the ESPN scroll said that Bob Sanders was out for the season. Then again, I really should have expected that at some point before the playoffs, right? I probably watched less of the KU loss to K-State than I’ve watched of any KU game in the past four years.
S. and the girls have a new evening routine. She opens up her computer, pulls up the YouTubes, and they watch fun music videos. The vids run the gamut from our favorite kid music singer Laurie Berkner to the Black Eyed Peas and Beyonce. Their favorite song, though, is Miley Cyrus' “Party in the USA.” No surprise, I think most girls under the age of 10 would say that right now.
Thank goodness the World Series is over. I watched a total of five minutes of the six games. Just couldn’t take A-Rod and the Yanks winning. It made me sad that Pedro couldn’t get it done last night. It’s always disappointing when a guy who was as good as he was loses it. I was hoping for one last classic performance from him. The one upside to the Series was how it brought up discussion of Willie Wilson and Willie Mays Aikens.
In lieu of the regular Reader’s Notebook entries I provide monthly, it’s time for an update on my progress with Infinite Jest. I won’t lie: it’s been a slow go. And I’ll also admit for all the excitement of beginning the book in September, I was also kind of dreading it. I’m used to reading books that fall in the 250-400 page range. Books I can knock out in 36 hours if conditions allow, or more likely inside a week.
I’m thinking about using my next check from work to print a few hundred of these to distribute, randomly. How To Use An Apostrophe It reminds me of the days when I worked in a warehouse. After paying my dues and working there, oh, for five years or so, I moved to the night shift and got to spend a lot of time driving a stand-up forklift around.* One of our duties was to replenish the stock pulled by the dayshift.
As you might imagine, I've been thinking about the last ten years a lot lately. I'm nothing if not a sucker for the end of decades, since they are loaded with opportunities to make <em>best of</em> lists, consider the ways life has changed, and in general have an excuse to remember the past. What I've been struck by while thinking about the 00s is how fast they've gone. Seriously, it seems like just yesterday we were preparing for the big Y2K meltdown.
Halloween was a success. Well, an <em>A-</em> I suppose. Mostly good with a few of the standard issues that are known to plague the holiday. Our girls went as Dorothy (M.), the Wicked Witch of the West (C.), and the Cowardly Lion (L.). “Big fans of the Wizard of Oz?” you ask. No. In fact, our girls have never seen the movie, although we’ve read part of the original book. Two of M.
The end of October. That means one thing for school-age children: dressing up as their favorite saint for All Saints Day celebration. Well, thats what M. and C. did this week, since they attend a Catholic school. C.’s program was Thursday. She went as Saint Catherine, who helped sick people. We dressed her in a rather minimalist costume consisting of the teacher-suggested pillow case smock and a veil. To help the sick people, she took her Fisher Price doctor bag.
Below is a link to an article I think all parents should read. It addresses a very important subject I think many of us have some fears about. An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 20011) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems.
The travel gods were with us, for the most part, and we had a successful trip to-and-from Kansas City over the girls' fall break. First, our biggest thanks to our many friends who cleared their schedules, opened their homes, and loaded up on Boulevard Wheat to spend time with us. While the large number of kids under six running around both Friday and Saturday nights meant our adult conversation to kid chasing ratio was approximately 1:3, we still enjoyed seeing everyone.
Crazy few weeks here en La Casa del Blogger. I believe I’ve mentioned that we’ve been doing some renovations over the past two months. Well, I took my first shower in our completely remodeled bathroom Tuesday morning. We’re still waiting on some lighting and a mirror, but we’re almost done. But we’ve had contractors in the house for the better part of eight weeks, which has thrown us all off our games a bit.
Another weekend where I was super busy and I watched hardly any football. Perhaps I should just call these weekend wrap ups rather than football reviews. So we’ll knock the football out first and move on to what else I did this weekend after. A very disappointing weekend for the Jayhawks. I was working Saturday night, so I was only home in time to see the last 20-25 minutes of the game.
Maybe I should move the family to remote northwest Australia. It seems like there’s exciting stuff to write about there. This is not necessarily safe for work, although it is from an allegedly legitimate news source.* No oral sex, says ute crash waitress ”It may have looked bad when police first arrived as my girls were hanging out all over the place. I also had a $5 note wedged between my boobs so they probably just assumed I was a sex worker or something and he'd already paid me.
A book a week? Big freaking deal. Try a book a day. Our Towns - For Nina Sankovitch, a Book a Day, Every Day In a time-deprived world, where book reading is increasingly squeezed off the page, it is hard to know what’s most striking about Ms. Sankovitch’s quest, now on Day 350, to read a book every day for a year and review them on her blog, www.readallday.org.
Please join me in celebrating Hispanic heritage month. This week, it’s all about el futbol. A long weekend for el futbol. There was a game of some interest to me Thursday. However, given the math, which seemed to require that I pull for Missouri to beat Nebraska, I stuck with Must See TV and didn’t watch any of the Deluge in Columbia. Friday, that weather moved into our area. Fortuitously, that just happened to be the night I was assigned to cover my first Friday night futbol game of the year.
When I hear about people staying up all night to play video games these days, it kind of makes sense, since modern games offer so much depth and possibilities for play. Looking back, why the hell would we play Atari all day? Those games sucked. Need proof? Check out Atari’s 1978 catalog. Things only got slightly better before the 2600 faded away nearly a decade later. A look at the 1978 Atari Catalog
What a waste. One of the great pitching seasons of the past 20 years blown on a team that lost 97 games and had to rally in September to earn a tie for last place. Worse, they were so bad that they’ve put what should be a shoe-in Cy Young award for Zack Greinke in danger by their inability to hit or field the ball. Not exactly the progress I and other Royals fans were looking for last spring.
The feature in this week’s Sports Illustrated is about Kenny Washington, the man who broke the NFL’s color barrier in 1946. There’s a great sidebar covering the Washington Redskins' refusal to sign black players until 1962, due entirely to their virulently racist owner George Preston Marshall. There is a fantastic picture in the article, which unfortunately is not in the on-line version. But the image is described below. American Nazi Party members, with no evident sense of irony, demonstrated in D.
Weird weekend. No work, but a 3.75 hour KU game kind of messed up Saturday, and then preparations for hosting some friends Sunday afternoon/evening kind of wiped out all the day games. So this will be very heavy on KU, a healthy dose of Colts, and a few random thoughts on the other games. KU - Southern Miss. Closer than I would have liked, but I think it’s a solid win.
It was kind of a tough week. The weather sucked for most of the time. All three sisters were fighting colds and/or fevers much of the time. Especially in the hours after school, they were extra cranky. Also, we’re in the midst of some renovations in the house, requiring me to be home all day. Thank goodness for Thursday night TV! NBC might suck the other six nights of the week,* but they are once again bringing the heat on Thursdays.