It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Hurricane Ditka!

So it's been quite a while since my last update. Let me try to recap all that's happened over the last couple weeks.

A couple weeks ago, we decided to take a spur of the moment weekend trip up north of the cities with a couple friends of ours. The plan was to camp out and spend some time on the lake on their boat. Perhaps we'd go to the casino that's nearby. We were camping on his uncle's land (right where his grandpa lives) and his uncle has two campers set up there - he goes up there quite a bit. We were welcomed to use the campers, but Liz and I decided it would fun to get the tent out, anyway, as we hadn't used it all Summer. It went up easily enough, although Liz had removed a couple of the tent stakes to stake things down in the garden and neglected to replace them. No big deal, though.

Well, it was no big deal until about 3 in the morning and a massive thunderstorm hit. I was laying there, awakened by a noise that sounded something like a rushing train. But, at three o'clock, I wasn't exactly awake. Well, I was certainly awake when Hurricane Ditka came crashing down on us and instantaneously pushing the top of the tent down under its wrath and lifting the bottom of the tent up into it's jaws where we were missing tent stakes.

Fortunately, Hurricane Ditka was just warming up. Liz and I stepped outside into what was really just a lot of wind and plenty of lightning. The tent came down in record time (I suspect 5 minutes or less) and we high-tailed it over to my friend's grandpa's house. So, at three in the morning, we came barging into some old guy's house and spent the night in relative comfort.

The rest of the weekend went far more to plan. Some boating, some gambling at the casino. Lots of sitting by the fire drinking and eating hot dogs. We also introduced our friends to the wonder that is pudgie pies.

Aside from that bit of excitment, most things have been pretty normal around here. I go to work everyday and then Liz and I usually either hit the gym or have a soccer/softball game in the evening. Our softball team continues to be miserable. We haven't won a game, yet, and, in all honesty, I'm one of the best players on the team, which is really depressing because....well...if any of you have seen me play softball, you'd know. We have our final game this Thursday - our last hope to not go winless on the season. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I know what the result is going to be, already.

This weekend, Liz and I will be taking off for the green land known as Wisconsin for Nate's "Super Happy Fun" weekend at the cabin. I have no idea what we'll be doing, but I suspect cards, food, and drink will all be involved. Perhaps some shenanigans, as well. We'll see. Hurricane Ditka is officially not invited.

Also, Liz and I planned out a vacation to Seattle next month. Well, I use "planned" in the weakest sense possible. We really just bought airplane tickets, booked a hotel, and reserved a rental car. Aside from that, we have absolutely nothing planned. Should be fun, though. They have this place where people chuck fish at one another. Rock on.

Football season is coming up. The wife and I caught a glimpse of NFL action the other night when we flipped on the tube to see the Raiders of Oakland taking on the Eagles of Philadelphia. Of course, it was the 4th quarter of the season's first preseason game...the announcers had actually stopped doing any sort of play-by-play as I'm guessing they didn't know who any of the players were, nor cared to learn. It was much more like an episode of The Tonight Show, only with John Madden in the place of Johnny Carson and Al Michaels in the place of Ed McMahon...only they used a football game as the background and it wasn't particularly funny. The uniforms on the players looked legit, though, so I think they really were NFL players. Don't know what was up with the ref's jerseys, though - they're whack.

So I suppose, with football season upon us, I need to start thinking about getting fantasy football started. I'm sure I'll think about it a bit more before I actually do anything about it. For now, though...food. I'm hungry.

Later.