Let's see. Briefly, while I wait to see if I'm going to be lucky enough to get the Bucs/Chicago game on my home set today, saving me a trip in the chilly autumn drizzle up to the local sports bar...
SuperGirlfriend's ex father in law died last night. It's a single down note in what has otherwise been an excellent weekend for us. Her former in-laws have little time for her these days, but apparently her ex father in law was a very sweet man who was widely beloved. His death has been coming for a long time, but still, it's hit SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids hard. So she made some food for the SuperKids so her ex won't have to cook for them today, and took over a large home made fruit & cheese tray, along with some suitable clothes for the SuperKids to wear to the funeral. Leaving me here to blog, without really having anything meaningful at all to say. But what else is new?
The one friend I've made to date in Louisville outside SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids is my buddy Bane, from work. He's seven feet tall and has all the normal problems that accompany giantism, including an overstressed heart and an ulcerated spine. Friday before last he slipped on the ice on a friend's porch and went down hard, and whenever he takes a fall he has to take it very slowly for several days to make sure he hasn't done himself a terminal injury. Last time I spoke with him was a call to his house from work on Wednesday. He said he still was flat on his back and if he didn't get better by Friday, his parents were taking him to the hospital for X-rays, to see if anything more critical was needed. I advised him I'd call him again that night when I got home from work. I've called him every day since and no one is picking up the phone... so that can't be good, since, as stated, last I heard he was flat on his back and his parents weren't leaving his side.
I'm very much hoping not to get another bit of bad news this weekend. I don't know Bane well, but he's a very kind, pleasant, smart, funny, warm hearted guy, who also happens to be a fellow comics fan and HeroClix player, and he deeply admires my HeroClix House Rules. I'd hate to lose him. He's only in his early 20s. People as big as he is tend not to last long on this earth, I know. Still, there are few enough people around whose company I enjoy, and most of them refuse to move to River City.
Let's see... since I'm no longer trying to dodge anyone, I've reinstated the old links scroll from my previous blogs. So if you're hankering to check out any of my many many articles on geek nonsense, or my ineptly drawn but still hilarious cartoons, or my unpublished short stories or novels, or even my fan fic (which Julian Perez has described as being "gold plated bat guano"; hey, reviews don't get much betta dan dat), then eyes slideways, spud... it's all on the link bar.
Eventually I'll probably be putting up links to all the blogs I like the best, whether they link to me or not (stuck up bastards).
Oh, at this point, I suspect the Angelfire version of this blog is pretty much dead. I just like this one better. I keep meaning to get over to that one and post a notice of that there. Maybe later today...
ADDENDUM: Sitting here watching the Bucs play from my couch is an odd feeling... one I haven't had since I cleared out of Florida. I can't get used to it, of course... next week we'll doubtless be back up at the sports bar... but it's a nice way to end what has mostly been a lovely four day weekend, full of good food, some early Christmas decorating...
...and FUCKING CHRIS SIMMS FUMBLING ON THE ONE YARD LINE, GIVING THE BEARS A TOUCHDOWN THREE MINUTES INTO THE GAME.
Christly goddam sonofaBITCH.
::sigh::
Well, I was also going to mention that in addition to whipping up an awesome Thanksgiving dinner, and several wonderful breakfasts since then, this morning Tammy made me 'monkey bread'... a dish I'd never previously heard of, in which she cuts up pre made biscuit dough into hunks, dips the hunks in butter, brown sugar, and cinammon, then tosses them all into a Bundt pan and bakes them into a kind of mosaic-cake that you pull pieces off with your fingers and eat. Delicious stuff. And now the whole house smells like cinammon rolls, which is lovely, too.
Now, if the Bucs could just win this damn game, and Bane would just call me and tell me he's okay, life would be pretty sweet.
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So this Boy Scout, couldn't have been older than eleven, is holding up this kinda chubby looking Scotch Pine. It was.... ehhhh... okay...
Well, good luck to Bane, at least, which is by any sand measure the really important item. I had a self-refreshing sports screen running in a separate window during the last 5 minutes (official minutes, that is, not the real world eternity) of the 4th quarter, so I saw that the Bucs gave the fans a good game by coming back and teetering on the edge of victory for a while -- at least until the Bears recovered the ball.
ReplyDeleteMonkey bread was a new one to me, too, as I'd told Tammy separately. A search brought plenty of recipes up instantly, with most of the differences being in the choice of commercial dough and whether or not to add chopped nuts.
I did a quick edit of my site, one of the items being removing the link to the old Angelfire site. I haven't scoped out the situation to see if ABEHM is fully redundant now or not.
If I were to fish for something less immediately comprehensible than actually wanting to watch a football game - why I should feel any kinship with a team or care for the contest - it might easily be any desire to go do it in a sports bar. But, no, wait... I can see that. Being around a large group of people interested in the game probably can't help but make it more fun (unless you happen to be rooting for the out of towners in a home game)- which is probably what helped make the Nuremburg rally so much fun. It also helps separate that activity from the refuge that should be home, which strikes an appealing chord for me.
Then again, I enjoy getting away to a comics convention for an extended weekend, so to each his own.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteABEHM isn't redundant as such; it's just history. I may mine it for stuff to repost over here, if it seems like there are more people reading this blog than read that one. But if you want to dump the link, that's fine. I should probably post one over here. For that matter, I should probably go in over there and post a link to here, since I'm no longer trying to duck anyone.
Football is a game I have more or less liked, at least, on some vague, hypothetical level, since I was a kid reading Joe Archibald sports books. Of all the sports, it's the one I feel is the most enjoyable to watch, and the one whose tactics and strategy I can grasp the most clearly. Of course you know I used to mock all professional sports and those who allowed themselves to become emotionally interested in what is, at best, a mug's game... but as I've pointed out on previous blogs, I do keep my emotions pretty firmly reined in and allow myself no illusions -- I support my team as long as my team wins. That's the deal. A professional sports franchise is not a person and the players on it are certainly not my friends. I do not owe it 'loyalty' in good times and in bad.
Chris Simms had begun to show an admirable facility for coming from behind to win games, and it looked as if he was going to do it again this week. However, I think a trifecta of factors came together in the last two minutes of that game to foil his burgeoning talents:
1. Gruden called the wrong play. At 3rd and 2 in the red zone, you give the ball to Mike Alstott. I don't know how many times this has been proven in the last three weeks, but I'd guess it's at least half a dozen. Yeah, the Bears defense is at its best against the run, but they were tired by then.
2. That goddam announcer had to slap a curse on the Bucs, and Chris, just as that drive was hitting its stride. "This is how quarterbacks are measured," the dim bulb babbled. "Coming from behind to win for his team against the best defense in the League... Chris Simms seems to have the Bears defense on the ropes". Four seconds later, that terrible play call came in from the sidelines and Chris threw an incompletion.
3. Given that much to work with, the gods decided they might as well let the Bucs usual luck make a comeback. So it was that Matt Bryant shanked what should have been the easiest tying field goal in the world.
And so it goes. All last season and the season before, the Bucs were snakebit... they found ways to lose games in the last five minutes that you'd have sworn were safely in the bag. It was sheer anguish. This season, they'd been finding ways to win games that looked out of reach... until this week.
Well, it's not over yet. They're still doing far better than they have at any other time since the Super Bowl year. But oh, I wish they could have beaten Chicago yesterday. If they'd just given it to Alstott...
I'm sorry to hear about Tammy's ex-father in law, hope y'all are holding up okay. And I hope Bane ends up okay, keep us all posted.
ReplyDeleteI'm doing fine, Tony. Thanks. And to Mike Norton as well, who took on the task of email crutch Saturday into Sunday.
ReplyDeleteMy ex-father-in-law was a very sweet man. Before his dementia set in, he had an insanely quirky sense of humor (which ALWAYS appeals to me) and was kind-hearted and never cross with anyone. He had a hateful, selfish, manipulative wife and I felt sorry for him. I know he loved her and seeing them together, you could tell he always would. When the dementia set in and she could no longer physically care for him (and the risks of him wandering...which became a dangerous situation 3 or 4 times before they finally did something about it), and the placed him in a nursing home, she wouldn't go see him. We would go. My ex and I. Sometimes with the kids, sometimes without. But always. Every time. He would ask where she was. He would ask why she wasn't there. Why she wouldn't come see him. What he had done to upset her. It was wrenching. She, on the other hand, then free of the responsibilities of taking care of her invalid husband was hitting the bingo and gambling boat circuit and not looking back. Family holidays, she didn't care if he showed up or not. I would INSIST that if we were hosting arrangements were made for him to get to my house, whether we got him or someone else brought him. She would ignore him, other than to pose for pictures. It sickened me. The man worked multiple jobs and took care of her and four children (one of the stories I most remember was my mother-in-law BRAGGING that she thought my ex was old enough to be weaned from the bottle...especially those midnight feedings...and my ex-father-in-law disagreed and she told me how "stupid" he was. He would come home after working two shifts and lie on the floor holding a bottle through the crib rails to feed the baby.). These same children were little better than their mother. They had better excuses. They were working and had lots of kids. One of the sibs lived out of town and the youngest is a case himself. I guess it's easy for me to say they should have done more for him. It quit being my problem a little over a year ago. But, I just have a hard time forgetting some of this stuff. And I just feel like he deserved so much more than he got from the people he loved the most. Yeah, I'm done ranting.
One last note, I do want to thank all of you, and especially Highlander who has doled out hugs as if they were a bottomless pocket full of pennies. I appreciate all of you.
Oh, yeah, and Tony, while I don't have all the information...and maybe my note here will prompt him...Highlander did hear a little about Bane and things, I believe, are roughly the same. He is still laid up, but no worse.
Hey man. Sorry to hear about Bane's fall, if you get a chance to talk to him, let him know a bunch of random strangers are wishing him well.
ReplyDeleteCondolences also for the Bucs loss, and give Tammy a hug for me.
ttyl