My Life as a Degenerate Criminal

Well, as usual, it's been a while since I've posted anything to my blog. On the other hand, life has been anything but normal lately. With the holidays and all, everything is a little "up in the air" at the moment.

Let's see, where do I start?

Last Thursday (a week ago already, geez), Liz and I packed up and made the drive back to Sheboygan. We spent the night there and then spent Christmas Eve with the family. We got to watch the first half the the Packer game but then had to go to church. Not to my surprise, there weren't many people there for that service. ;) Also not to my surprise, the moment the service ended, everyone in the Church knew that the score was tied with less than a minute to play. I don't think a grass fire could spread that fast. We made it to the truck just in time to turn the radio on and hear Favre take the final knee to kill the remainder of the clock before Longwell's game winner.

We spent the rest of the night with the family - we had a nice dinner and opened Christmas presents. Liz's folks got me started on my new computer with a new case, DVD drive and floppy drive. Liz got herself a jacket exactly like the one I got her (and she was wearing at the time). *sigh* Ahh well, at least she likes it.

Christmas morning, we packed everything back in the truck and took off toward Clintonville. There was some snow falling so the drive wasn't particularly enjoyable, but we made it home ok and it didn't take much longer than usual, surprisingly.

I entered the house to cheers and shouts of joy - not because Liz and I were home, but because the TV wasn't working and the repairman had apparently arrived. (Kinda makes you wonder if the three wise mean were really just heating/cooling repairmen - mangers are drafty, ya know.)

Mom had bought a nice HD TV and had it delivered on Thursday. The poeple that delivered it hooked it all up but, because the TV had been cold, they told her that it would have to sit for at least 3 hours to warm up before it could be turned on. So, the installation folks took off without ever testing it out. Guess what? Yeah, no kidding, they didn't hook it up right. When I showed up, everyone was watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with no sound. *sigh* It took a couple hours and a jigsaw, but we got it working, to the delight of everyone, who could now listen and laugh at those unfortunate Griswalds. I have just two acronyms for you...ESPN HD. I miss it already.

We spent the rest of the evening having a nice dinner and opening presents, as usual. Gavin spent the day with hsi face plastered to a TV screen watching Dora the Explorer. I'm not actually kidding, in most cases, his face was actually pressed against the screen. I see this as a good thing - he was obviously counting pixels trying to determine the screen resolution and aspect ratio of the TV so that he could later compare to the new high definition television to ensure that we were getting the highest possible quality we could get. He's such a good kid.

Saturday night, we packed up (again) and headed for Appleton to see the amazing Natron. It was pretty late when we got there, but we soon found ourselves driving around town looking for a store that was open on Christmas so that we could get some food. Apparently, Nate the bachelor eats out a lot. ;) We then crashed at the Nate-pad for the night (I really mean it - Liz and I zonked out on the couch while Nate was sitting next to us playing video games).

The next morning, we sat around at Nate's place playing games and watching football. Mr. Lucht, himself, even made an appearance that day. It was nice to see him again - it had probably been almost a year since I last saw the guy.

I found myself totally frustrated that, while the football games all included a constant ticker that told about the life and times of Reggie White (who passed away this weekend, although I'm sure you all know about this because it was all over the news), there was not a single word mentioned about the tsunamis in Asia that have now claimed the lives of over 100,000 people. Funny what is considered news worthy and what isn't, don't you think? Nick summed it up best as we were sitting around talking about it. "All those people in Asia...combined Super Bowl rings? 0." Apparently, that explains a lot. I was just very frustrated.

With regards to the disaster on the other side of the world, my heart really goes out to those folks. I'm sure I should feel worse about it than I really do, but I just have nothing to compare this to. What's your frame of reference for 100,000 people being killing in an instant? That's essentially saying that Green Bay was swallowed whole my Lake Michigan.

In addition, I'm not sure if I'm upset about the whole situation or if I'm just upset at Bush, but, after not once vetoing a spending bill over the last 4 years, Bush says that all he can come up with in terms of relief aid is about $35 million dollars. Maybe the numbers are just too astronomical for me to understand, but that seems like a rather paltry amount considering what has happened. Of course, I'd like to see more money sent to Asia in terms of aid, but I don't know where it would come from. Bush has already put us into a ginormous deficit. Grrrrr....

Well, enough about that - the whole situation just makes me upset.

Sunday night, Liz and I traveled back to Clintonville to have Christmas at my sister's place with my dad. As usual, we had a nice meal and opened presents - Liz and I were getting pretty good at eating and tearing wrapping paper by this time.

Finally, Monday morning, Liz and I packed up (one last time) to make the trip back to Rochester. Snow was falling again and the roads really weren't any good. There were a number of vehicles in the ditch and a jack-knifed semi along the highway. Once we got West of Wausau, life got easier, but it was pretty touch and go for a while. I hate driving in that stuff. Nonetheless, we made it home safely, even if it took us a while.

Tired and stressed, Liz and I took the rest of the day and watched the extended version of "The Return of the King" in the mcglone-a-plex. Life is good. :)

So, I've been back at work this week while Liz has taken then entire week off. She has spent the week painting the basement (which I got to help with last night after work). Hopefully, it'll be finished soon and the mcglone-a-plex will be, more or less, complete. I'll try to get pictures of it once I'm finished, but I'm remarkably lazy so it may never happen. We'll see, I guess.

Tuesday night, we got an unexpected visit from a cable "repo man." He came to tell us that we hadn't made our cable payment and was there to either collect a check or cut off our service. Of course, all of my records say that we've been paying our bills, but that, apparently, is not what their records say. After talking to the guy that came to our place for a while and a woman back at Charter even longer, it became apparent what had happened. A couple months ago, I had the service changed so that we'd have a higher bandwidth and be able to connect to our work machines from home. Apparently, when they did that, they changed our account number. The checks that I send to Charter each month, however, are transferred electronically through my bank and still had the old account number on them. So, while one account had missed payments, the other one had a credit of $100+ on it. Once they figure out what they had done, they were very apologetic and left. Funny how they'd go out of their way to send someone to our place to collect $42 in late payments but they wouldn't even pick up the phone to tell us that we had payed $130 too much on a different account.

Just after that guy left, Sarah stopped by on her way back to Mankato. She hung out for a little while and had some dinner. We chatted for a while and, eventually, she decided that she should start her 2 hour drive back to Mankato. It was about that time she realized she couldn't find her keys. You guessed it...locked in her car...staring out at her from the passenger seat.

So, I had the wonderful task of trying to break into her car with a coat hanger. Fortunately, it wasn't too cold out that night. I managed to get it open, eventually. Now, if I can just cut down the time it took me by about 15 minutes, I could become a professional thief. Nonetheless, I'm well on my way.

This weekend, Liz and I will be making a trip up to the cities to celebrate New Year's with Andy Lagatta and fiancee. It's been a long time since I've sene Andy, too, so I'm looking forward to that. He's had a New Year's party up in the cities the last few years running, but Liz and I are usually back in Wisconsin for New Year's so this is the first year we're actually going to make it. It should be loads of fun.

So, have I typed enough yet? If you've made it this far, congratulations, you don't have ADD (unless of course this is the 5th time you've had to read this to get this far, then maybe you do). Catch y'all later.

Take care,
Corey

Holiday Injustice?

Brett Favre didn't make the pro bowl? You've got to be joking...so who did he lose out to? Well, there's McNabb...sure, sure - McNabb's having a great season now that T.O. is there...er...was there. Then there's Culpepper. Yeah, he's having a great season throwing pitch and catch with Moss, and showed that he can still be effective without Moss. So who else is in the NFC? Michael Vick?!? You've got to be joking! How in the world could Favre lose out to Vick this season?

I think Vick is a fine athlete, but let's just break down the numbers for a minute.

Passing Yards:

Favre: 3527
Vick: 2278

Passing Touchdowns:

Favre: 25
Vick: 13

Interceptions:

Favre: 16
Vick: 12

Touchdowns/Interception Ratio:

Favre: 1.5625
Vick: 1.08

Completion Precentage:

Favre: 63.4%
Vick: 55.7%

QB Rating:

Favre: 88.7
Vick: 76.6

Rushing Yards:

Favre: 40
Vick: 889

Fumbles (Lost):

Favre: 1 (1)
Vick: 3 (0)

Now, look through those stats and tell me on what grounds Vick deserves to go to the Pro Bowl more than Favre. You probably spotted the huge discrepancy in rushing yardage. Sure, Vick has 849 more yards on the ground than Favre, but that still doesn't make up for the 1,249 passing yards Favre has over Vick. Even adding Vick's rushing TD's to his passing TD's you still come up with only 16 touchdowns on the year, 9 short of Favre. Let's see....9 TDs...that's 54 points, folks.

So what does Vick have on Favre this season? I suppose team record. Favre is on the 8-6 Packers while Vick is on the 11-3 Falcons. But, has anyone seen who Atlanta has played this season? Their schedule of fierce competition includes San Francisco (2-12), St. Louis (6-8), Arizona (5-9), Detroit (5-9), Kansas City (6-8), the Giants - the Giants with Eli, that is (5-9), New Orleans (6-8), Oakland (5-9), and Carloina (6-8) and Tampa Bay (5-9) twice each. They've played 2 games all season against teams with winning records - the Broncos at 8-6 and the Chargers at 11-3. Total combined record for their opponents? 81-115.

The combined record of Green Bay opponents? 92-104. Sure, it's not a great deal better, but it's still a tougher schedule than Atlanta's, and that schedule includes games against the New York Giants before they gave up on their season and put in Eli - when they were actually playaing well - and Tennessee when McNair was still in the starting lineup. Those teams picked up most of their losses since playing the Packers.

I just don't get it. Favre is having a much better season than Vick, who is struggling to learn the West Coast Offense. Is Vick a great player? Yes. Is he electric and fun to watch? Yes. Is he a pro-bowl caliber player. Yes, but not this year.

Favre got the shaft. Heck, if nothing else, you'd think not missing a start in 8,000 years would be worth something. Geez...does anyone even remember a quarterback other than Favre starting a game in Green Bay? I imagine Majkowski is probably taking Geritol by now.

A New Home...

Well, what'tya know? I no more than get my site updated and I'm all happy and my wife goes and throws a wrench into the whole thing. Lizzy and I exchanged our Christmas gifts tonight and, while all she got was some boring clothes, she got me a 1 year lease on a little plot of cyberspace I can call my own. :) What a woman!

Let me be the first to welcome you to themcglones.net. As you can see, it looks just like the old place, just a new name. Speaking of new names, if you have links to my blog (ahem, Nate), you may want to update them to the new address you're seeing now. My new blog address is: http://www.themcglones.net/blog.html. The homepage, of course, is simply http://www.themcglones.net.

For the time being, I'll leave the old site up as I try to forward people over here. Changing Internet addresses for me is a lot like changing a street address for most people - I have references to my web address all over the place and I'll need to get as many of those updated as I can. I'd hate people to take a wrong turn at Albequerque and end up at an Internet dead end. But, eventually, the old site will be retired...somday...trust me. ;)

The biggest change will be that my new blog entries will all be published here instead of the old site. Of course, the old site is nothing more than a redirection now, but it's still imporant to note.

Well, I suppose that's enough from me for now. Welcome to themcglones.net from the mister and the misses.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Site Rebuild Complete!

So I'm now all done rebuilding mcglone.com and the changes are live! What? You don't see the changes? Bah!

Actually, the changes I made are all infrastructure changes - the look and feel of the site (with the exception of the recipes page) hasn't really changed at all. The recipes page got a little update, but, even still, it's pretty close to how it used to be.

So why make the change if it still looks the same? Well, the reason being is that my site was overly complex and I didn't like it. All of the formatting was done through tables and it made page updates more difficult than it should have been. To fix this, I've removed all tables from the pages and replaced them with a combination of DIV tags and a CSS file. So what does that mean to those of you that don't understand what I'm talking about? Pretty much nothing - it just means that I've put forth some effort to make my life easier (and to learn a bit more about using CSS with DIV tags). Just realize that the site you're looking at is entirely different than the one you saw last time you were here....except for the content...and the look and feel...and the picture of Gavin that has never changed.... Ok, fine, so it's still the same old site, but at least I know it's different.

(By the way, if the formatting looks weird, try hitting Refresh on your browser. I found that Firefox likes to cache CSS files so it wasn't picking up my new CSS file right away.)

So, besides my geekdom getting the best of me, what else is new around here?

Well, we had family come and visit this weekend - that included Liz's folks as well as her sister, Sarah (aka Little Red) and her boyfriend, Marvin. The ladies spent their time making cookies (and gossiping about boys, no doubt) while me and the guys spent our time watching football and playing video games on the big screen.

Liz had wanted a certain video game for some time now and I finally got it for her this weekend. The game? Dance Dance Revolution Extreme. The concept, you turn the game on, you dance on a little mat, fun is had by all (that being the dancer and everyone laughing at the dancer). The game is actually pretty fun, as long as you can stomach gobs of techno music with the occasional mambo or jazz tune for good measure. Apparently, something about a thumping beat must make the game more friendly to the "rhythmically impaired." The mat is remarkably cheap and leads to some frustration, but it was either the cheap mat for $20 or the good mat for $100. Ummm....yeah. Anyway, on the plus side, Lizzy really seems to like it and it's actually a decent workout, considering it's basically step aerobics with psychedelic backgrounds and techno music.

I imagine the weather back home is quite similar to what it is here - a regular heat wave. When I left for work this morning, we were already 2 degrees above the projected high for the day - and that was at 8 this morning! Of course, I suppose it didn't hurt that the projected high for the day was -3. Let me tell you, the walk to work is a bit chilly right now. As a great DJ once said, "It's butt-puckerin' cold out there!" I don't know what that means, but I thought it was funny.

Well, I suppose that's about it for me. Sorry about the delay in postings, but I've been trying to get the new site up. Catch y'all later!

In case I don't post again before X-Mas, Happy Holidays, everyone!

Corey

The McGlone-A-Plex is Open!

Hey folks,

Well, it's official, the McGlone-A-Plex is now open for business. I've been meaning to get some pictures together to post here so that you can all see it in it's splendid glory, but it seems my laziness has gotten the best of me yet again. Just imagine a movie theater with a fireplace. That's pretty much what it looks like.

We picked up a couple chairs last weekend and Todd, one of the guys I worked with at Relion, cut a piece of wood for me that would hold the projector. Tuesday night, I set about suspending the projector from the cieling via cables. It took a while to get it up and level, but it's there now, hanging in splendid glory.

Being too tired to bother with it, I simpyl left it alone for the last couple days. Now, however, with Liz's family coming to visit this weekend, we needed to clean up the house and that meant I needed to clean up the mess I had made in the basement. Amazingly, drilling 1/2" holes through sheet rock cielings covered with acoustical "sprinkles" (constructed from the body of Jimmy Hoffa, perhaps?) makes quite a mess. There was much vacuuming to be done.

So, if you'd like to come over and view a high quality film (may I suggest Groundhog Day or My Cousin Vinny?), you are officially invited. Of course, this official invitation is only for the non-freaky-stalker-types that read my blog. It's ok, Nate, you can still come. In addition, if you have any good names for the McGlone-a-plex, I'm open for that, as well.

Like I said, Liz's family is coming to visit this weekend. Tonight, her folks are coming up, but they probably won't arrive until quite late. Tomorrow, her sister, Sarah and her boyfriend, Marvin, are coming over. The ladies will make Christmas cookies while Marvin and I play Mario Kart on a 20 foot screen. Ahhh, good times. I'm going to need some beer. :)

By the way, Liz is in heaven getting more recipes online for those that are hungry. Oddly enough, although she has all these good recipes, we had fish sticks for dinner last night. Oh, yeah...that's because I made dinner last night.

Later, y'all!

Gah! Bush!

Grrrr....

Not so grrr.

Props to Nick for finding the "Not so grrr" part of this post. It is due to his abundance of free time that we can all enjoy a good laugh.

The Packers and the Playoffs...

So, here are the current scenarios for the Packers to clinch a playoff spot (according to ESPN.com):

The Packers can clinch playoff berth with:
1) Win
OR
2) Tie and Rams loss
OR
3) Tie and Panthers loss or tie
OR
4) Bears loss or tie and Rams loss and Panthers loss and Cowboys loss or tie,
OR
5) Bears loss or tie and Rams loss and Panthers loss and Bucs loss or tie and Seahawks win
OR
6) Bears loss or tie and Rams loss and Giants loss or tie and Cowboys loss or tie
OR
7) Bears loss or tie and Rams loss and Giants loss or tie and Bucs loss or tie and Seahawks win, OR
8) Bears loss or tie and Giants loss or tie and Cowboys loss or tie and Panthers loss
OR
9) Bears loss or tie and Giants loss or tie and Panthers loss and Bucs loss or tie and Seahawks win

Honestly, they pay someone to come up with this garbage? The first one is the only one that makes any sense at all. If the Packers win, they're in. If not, let's just say we'll wait until next week and call it good. Sheesh.

And the Blogs Keep Coming

Well, yet another has fallen to the dark side...er...has started a blog. I don't think Liz's dad is a dark Jedi, but you never know, them Sith are awfully wily. So Ron has started a new blog: here. Unfortunately, this one, from its modest beginnings, seems intellectual and stuff. I suppose it'll be a nice change of pace. :)

And, for anyone that cares to know, there are now delicious recipes of delicious goodness on my website (you can thank Liz for that). Apparently, she had a sweet tooth last night (not sure how that's different from any other night, really) because all that made it on the site were desserts. Sorry, Nate. If you want some, you'll have to cook 'em yourself - my website is not yet that advanced (but I'm working on it). Of course, you could always find yourself a nice lady-friend - I heard most of them can cook. ;)

Gavin v2.0

Perhaps a lot of you already know, but Kara is pregnant again. She has been for a few months now, but she wanted to keep it a secret for a while. Just recently, she started telling everyone. I believe the new one will be due in early Summer, just in time for her vacation.

So, 'grats to the sis!

I Need a Weekend

Yes, suppsedly, the weekend just ended, but can't I apply to get another one or something? Unfortunately, Liz and I didn't make it home this weekend (weather report was ugly and we didn't feel like getting caught driving in freezing rain). We were hoping to come up for the Hansen family Christmas party, but no such luck. Having a weekend "off," Liz and I set out to get some stuff done around the house.

Saturday morning, we hopped in our dope ride and drove up to the cities. Apparently, there's some furniture store up there called IKEA that Liz wanted to check out. We were still trying to find some chairs for our basement movies theater. Little did I know that IKEA is apparently ginormous (that's the word of the day, for those keeping score at home). The entire store in on concrete "stilts" and you park under the building. Then, once you get inside, you walk through two huge floors of furniture displays. Fnially, you get into a warehouse the size of Clintonville and find the stuff you want to buy and take it home. We found a couple chairs and a new light fixture for the basement.

They had a special deal running - spend over $100 and you get a free Christmas tree. Getting a tree was supposed to be our next errand upon returning to Rochester, but this seemed like a good idea. Heck, it was a free tree. All of the trees were wrapped up tight as can be, so you couldn't see what any of em looked like and I was thoroughly expecting to get home only to find that we brought home a Charlie Brown tree. To my amazement, the tree is gorgeous. Sure beats the prices of most trees in Rochester (I think Lion's Club sells 'em for $100+ over by Wal-Mart). Heck, free beats most anything.

So, we made it back from the cities by mid-afternoon and got the tree up in the living room. Next project? Putting up lights on the house. This involved plenty of scaling a ladder and hanging out in the cold. Fortunately, Saturday wasn't too bad. We now have lights on the house, wreaths in the windows, and some "net" lights on our shrubberies (insert funny line from Monty Python here).

We finished putting up the lights about the same time it got dark so we retired to the indoors to continue our day. Next up were the chairs we had bought. These are the types of chairs that require "some assembly" (meaning that they give you a bunch of chunks of wood and some bolts). They weren't too hard to put together, but it took a little while. Once the chairs were finished, we moved upstairs to work on our new (did I mention it was free?) Christmas tree. We got the decorations on and, finally, were ready to call it a night, more or less. We finished with a few beers and some online games with Dave and Nate.

Yesterday was a pretty blah day. Liz and I slept in and, after grabbing some lunch, we worked on getting the new light fixture up in the basement. What a total pain in the ass. Liz had gotten some "pseudo-track lighting" fixture that was horribly painful to install. It took us a couple hours, at least. It's up now, but I sure hope it never has to come down. :(

The Packers were generally sickening but somehow managed to come away with a win. I guess it's fortunate that Joey Harrington is horrible, too. A few more gamey games with Nate and Dave and that was it for our weekend.

Tonight, I'll probably watch Monday Night Football, even though it involves two teams that aren't in the playoff race and I don't especially care about. Even still, Monday Night Football is still much better than most of the other garbage on TV.

Yeah, so that was all useless and stuff and I've got nothing important to say, so I'll be going now. Ta-ta.

Corey

Xmas at the McGlone Household

Well, Lizzy finally got back from Milwaukee last night (it is, indeed, nice to be married again) so we set off on the time-consuming task of doing our Christmas shopping. Bah. Endless walking, long lines, too many people, babies crying, cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria, people! Not for us, I say!

This year, our endless walking consisted of a walk to our den, where I sat at one computer and Liz sat at the other, shopping in the virtual mega-mall of the Internet. Got the perfect gift to get someone but don't know what store you can get it at? Google has the answer, my friend. (All bow to the great sage, Google.)

Hauling bags of goodies to the car in the freezing cold? No way. All of the gifts we're getting people should be arriving at our place in 7-10 business days. :)

The whole process, which still took a couple hours and a handful of calls to the old homestead for advice, was rather painless and didn't involve a single crying baby (unless you count Gavin in the background yelling "Dora") and I never saw a cat living with a dog.

Now, however, Liz wants me to hang Christmas lights on the house...in the cold...when it's dark. I sure wish I could do that over the Internet, too. :-/

Well, I'd comment on the Packers, but I might make myself ill and I wouldn't want that, so I'll leave well enough alone. In case all of you out there are missing hockey season....anyone?...anyone?...Bueller?... Well, fine, but if you're reading my blog, you're going to hear about it anyway. Hey, don't gripe at me - I don't make you come out here. The Badgers swept a 2 game series against Minnesota-Duluth this weekend to move into first place in the WCHA. There's plenty of season left, but at 12-4 overall (9-3 in the conference), a young Badgers hockey team is looking good so far.

Besides the Christmas shopping, not a whole lot going on out this-a-way. With Liz gone, I don't get into much trouble. Heck, when Nate found out Lizzy was coming back, he even cancelled the strippers. :( Of course, not that Liz is back, I don't get into much trouble, either. All in all, I'm just a pretty boring guy.

Liz and I are debating coming home this weekend. The Hansen Family Christmas party is this weekend but the weather looks like it's going to be really crummy. As much as I'd like to be there for the party, driving across the state in freezing rain mixed with snow doesn't sound like much fun. :( So, whether we come home or not will, more than likely, be a game-time decision.

So, that's enough for now. Check y'all later.

Tech Update 2004

Yeah, so I'm not going to cover the entire year, just a couple key points that have cropped up in the last...oh...16 hours or so.

First of all, bigzoo.com is terminating service of their pre-paid long distance. Bah. There goes my 4 cents a minute long distance and now I'll actually have to figure out what to do about long distance. I've grown quite accustomed to that service and really liked it. If any of you out there use bigzoo.com, you might want to take a look at their homepage.

Also, Nate pointed out the price of a Pentium 4 processor to me this morning. With a little searching around newegg.com, we found that the Pentiums are actually looking better than the AMD processors now in terms of "bang for your buck." Right now, you can get an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor (with 512K L2 cache and 400 MHz front-side bus) for $200. You can get a comparable Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor (comparable in terms of operating speed) for $219 and the P4 has a 1 MB L2 cache and a 800 MHz front-side bus. For those of you that have no idea what I just said, the P4 seems to be a clearly superior processor for an additional $19.

Why do I care? Well, because 9 months ago, that just wasn't the case. AMD's processors have long been the "choice of geeks" because we've known enough to realize that the AMD processors were just as good as the over-priced Intel processors and could save us plenty of coin. My box at home, which I built in '01, runs an AMD processor. For the time being, that trend seems to have changed. Right now, the Intel processors have come down in price to be very competitive with the AMD processors. That's great news. Apparently, AMD has grabbed a large enough foothold on the CPU industry that Intel has had to take notice. Awesome. That means cheaper, faster computers.

Now, if only those folks made cars and could do something about gas mileage.

In all fairness, I didn't find any of this information. I bow to the superb technological awareness of Tron, for he is all-knowing and was kind enough to get me "in the loop."

Terminally Stuck at 99

When I log into blogger.com to add posts to my blog, I see a little counter next to my blog that tells me how many entries my blog currently has. It's been stuck at 99 for over a month now. I assume it's never going to move again. ;) I don't know what you can conclude from that, except that my blog has come a long way from my first post when I wasn't sure if I'd be posting for more than a week.

"The sky farted out a giant cloud of styrofoam insulation"

Yeah - that's not from me - just a great quote I pulled from Dave's Blog. That the kind of quality material you can find in that wonderful part of the Internet. Check it out.

So Theresa has her surgery yesterday. Things seem to be going well. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail I got from Ron:

---

"Well Theresa's surgery was successful. This morning she had a rib
resection. This was a procedure to remove about a 3-inch section of her
first (top) rib on her left side. This was necessary to relive a condition
known as thoracic outlet syndrome, where the veins and arteries are
constricted between the clavicle and first rib.

The surgery was about 1-1/2 hours long and went without complications. The
most common complication is a punctured lung from the procedure, but
fortunately they didn't have that problem.

Mardi has been with her all day and I have been in and out all day. I went
to her apartment this afternoon and did some office work while she was
zonked out. She is in A LOT of pain. They make an incision under her arm
and go in with a device like a bolt cutter and cut the rib out. So, it's
sort of like getting stabbed in the chest and then breaking a rib in two
places all at once.

Although she hurts, she is a trooper and still jokes around. She is at
Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee and it is a medical college so there are all
sorts of med students and residents tagging along with the doctors. I think
they like to give Theresa special attention. The med student that assisted
in surgery and held her arm up came in to see her this evening."

---

Liz is planning on going to see her this weekend and I'm debating whether I should go, as well, or stay here and work. I'd like to see T, but I really need to catch up on some work. I have a project I'm supposed to be working on for the guys at Relion and, unfortunately, it just hasn't been getting much attention lately.

In other news, it's Friday, and that's good. As for the Packer game, I have faith that the Pack pulls the upset. Watch for Al Harris to shadow TO all game long and get burned a couple times and for Diggs or Barnett to spend all day working the spy on McNabb. As long as Green is back in the lineup, the Packers should be able to exploit Phillies crummy run defense - even since they've moved Trotter to the middle. Pack by 1, 24-23. In a related story, Cincinnati just scored again...

So I suppose that's enough out of me. Take care, everyone.