It can mean only one thing…
Baseball season is upon us, and to celebrate this fact, Robyn and I are going to the Braves exhibition game against the World Champion Chicago White Sox tonight, and truthfully, I doubt conditions could be better…
After having the weekend season ticket package last year, and mostly due to spiraling expenses around renewal time, we’ve opted to get a 10 game package this time around, tonight’s game being one of them. We’re also going to the home opener against the Phillies next Monday, the start of what might hopfully be the 15th division title in a row.
What a crazy last week it’s been… We’ve been shopping in IKEA more often than I care to remember as we’ve taken up the arduous task of remodelling the condo. To be honest, we’ve had a bunch of crap laying around in various places (living room floor, dining table and bedroom floor to name a few) since before the wedding, but the clutter and junk has just reached breaking point, so we called in an expert Personal Organizer to help us reorganise and make use of space.
So all day Saturday and Monday was done doing that, and it’s not even finished… But damn, the little condo looks very spacious now. So Sunday was spent at IKEA, buying bookcases, CD towers and the likes as well as putting them together.
And to top it off, I had my biometrics taken for my immigration purposes, and we got news my final USCIS interview is way earlier than we thought, it’s on May 25th as opposed to sometime next year, so if things go well, I’ll be a permanant resident of the United States in time for my birthday. I guess the next step after that is citizenship, and I’m undecided upon that right now.
And now a fun item, who spotted the little “easter egg” on last nights episode of House? Want a clue?
House has Blackadder on his DVR, funny considering Hugh Laurie appeared in every series of Blackadder except the first… I thought it was a nice touch.
Also, since we’ve been so busy, we’ve managed to fill our poor TiVo up, so much so it’s started to auto delete programs to make space for new ones, thank goodness for the new recently deleted folder upgrade they made to our box, though I think a hard drive upgrade might be happening sooner rather than later, especially with the World Cup coming up in June/July.
Americans increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology. University researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Freedom of religion… But not freedom from religion.
AKA: March Sadness 2006
What a bracket busting day, highs, lows, you name it, this had it… I love March Madness, especially over the (mostly) crap the NBA dishes out, and tonight had two finishes that was basically a big FU to people who view college basketball as nothing but kids who run and shoot.
First up, LSU knocking off overall #1 Duke with a great finish that everyone outside of Durham and half the Georgia Dome were simultaniously laughing and crying over… It’s good to see Duke done over, but sad that it completely screwed my Atlanta region. Then came the game of the tournament so far, Gonzaga’s dramatic loss to UCLA.
Gonzaga led for approx. 39:55 and blew it in the final 5 seconds with a heartbreaking finish, I couldn’t sit down for the final 5 minutes, I couldn’t look for the final 2, I left the room with 2 seconds left. That’s what’s so great about March Madness, I have zero affiliations with Gonzaga, I couldn’t pick it’s location out on a map but yet, I was totally involved with this team over the course of the last week, just because I had picked them to go all the way… I was there, willing them on, nearly screaming at the TV on occasions. Outside of Rangers and Braves games, I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that.
So my dream is over, as are these updates I guess. Only my picks of UConn and Villanova are left out of the potential Final Four, I doubt I’ll be as involved with the rest of the tournament now, but I’ll still watch for the outcome of these awesome games, played by kids who just run and shoot, and they do it for the love of the game…
Yesterday we added a new furry face to our little family in the shape of Charlotte, a rescue via a friend of a daughter of one of Robyn’s co-workers… We were told she was about 2 months old but when we took her to the vet for an examination, shots etc it was revealed she was closer to 5 or 6 months old, and she had a few little problems, nothing that daily medication for a week or so wouldnt fix.
Of course, we were worried about how Felix and Sally would take to her since they run the place. There was a little sniffing around her crate when she first arrived, but not too much hissing. We finally let her out the crate when we got a little kitten friendly area set up, a fenced off part of the living room thet had a little bed, kitty litter, food and water. She decided to tuck herself into a corner for most of the night.
When I was watching Lost, she came out, sniffing around, eat some food, have a drink and use the litter before expanding her borders in more ways that one… The fence we errected was about 2′ tall, seeing as she’s a small kitten we assumed that would be enough, nope… In one leap she jumped over the fence and landed clean on an upper level of the neighbouring cat tower, some 5′ off the ground, so she prolly jumped around 8′.
Well, now she’s been out and about, we left a gap in the fence for her to get back to the litter and food and she’s managed to get there a couple of times today, but she’s mostly been hiding…
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Sally and Felix don’t seem to mind too much, I think they are as scared of her as she is of them.
Originally uploaded by FLC.
This is what “Atlantas News” thinks I am, and who are Atlantas News? An unwanted site scraping my RSS feed representing my site as if I’m some kind of contributer to their site on, well, Atlanta News and they decided to add this fucking image on top of every scraped post of mine as some kind of banner…
Talk about shenanigans, So I’ve sent them a little email saying that this kind of misrepresentation is completely uncool and if they don’t do something about it, well… I’ll be one unhappy blogger, thats for sure.
Thanks for the heads up Maigh
FYI: Here is what I wrote to them…
Hello there,
It has come to my attention that you are aggregating my rss feed (http://www.gregorsmith.com/blog/) for your site and while a notification of this would have been nice, I feel I have to complain as a) My content is strictly my content, there is no wishy washy Creative Commons license applied to it, I only sumbit it to aggregating sites I wish to be aggregated by and b) I feel that the choice of image you have use at the start of every damn entry (http://atlantasnews.net/files/images/atlanta39.jpg) is totally unrepresentative of my site, my work and most of all me.
So all I ask is eaither you remove my feed from your site or at the very least, replace that image for something more representative… Scam City is merely a name, not my business…
Not as “jihad” like as I could have done, but it got the point across pretty quickly.
The final minutes of Battlestar Galactica’s season finale. Sci-Fi do the right thing after TiVo’s accidentally cut off the last few minutes of the season… Season 3 looks like it’s gonna rock. [via]
A short, painful day today as some of my Elite 8 teams took a big fall… Namely Ohio State and last year’s national champions North Carolina.
I said last night that I thought Bradley would beat Pitt, and hey, I was right, if only it was Kansas instead of Bradley… But I’ll give them props because CBS’ on screen score in the bottom left corner said “BRAD PITT” throughout the whole game. Then the real fun began, and by real fun I mean real pain. George Mason stunned North Carolina, whoever predicted that is a smart, smart man, one who prolly made a crapload of bank off it. Then later on, Georgetown layed some serious smack down on Ohio State, despite only 4 of their players scoring. To be fair, Ohio State were never in the game at all, they led for a brief period early on, capitulated way too easy and disappeared into the night with barely a whimper.
At least everything else went my way, small favours.
Now we have to wait till Thursday for the Sweet 16 to start, and a few worrying games for me… Memphis vs. Bradley for one, especially with the roll Bradley are on, and of couse Gonzaga vs. UCLA. This will be the real test, up against a higher seed.