My beautiful wife just said, “I don’t want to work all weekend.”

Translate to English… Lets go to the mountains!

In the rain.

Woohoo!

I had a seriously shitty day at work today. My beautiful wife Jen also had a crappy day at work. We decided to go out to dinner, and when we were done we went out for a drink. She had a drink and I had a coke. Rest assured, my shitty day wasn’t that shitty.

Anyway, while out for that drink we happened to catch the 9th inning of the Reds vs Pirates game and we got to see Homer Bailey finish off a no-hitter. Nice! It was a nice reminder that for much of the rest of the country, baseball didn’t completely suck this year. Go Reds!

Jen and I have a few days off from work together coming up soon.  We want to take the kids for a get away.  Where should we go?

Should we go to New York?

Should we go to Washington?

Should we go to the mountains in New Hampshire?

What should we do?

Are these 4/27/12 Mission Beach in San Diego, CA sunset pictures the best pictures I’ve taken?  Could be.  I keep trying to get up early enough to sneak up to Salisbury or Hampton Beach to take some New England sunrise pictures but I keep over sleeping.  Someday.

This morning at 5:40 my step daughter and I went outside to do her stargazing homework. We were one cloud away from total success!

We saw Orion. In fact we saw so much of Orion that I think we were looking at the wrong stars when we saw it Monday morning. We also found a clearing through the trees that should have given a perfect view of The Big Dipper, but there were clouds blocking it. Damn!

We also saw perfect views of Jupiter and Venus, which always make me happy.

I’m exhausted.  I feel like I could sleep for a whole day.  Ever feel that way?  I’m generally fine, apart from a pair of very sore legs and what may be the start of a cold, but connecting the mental dots just seems like a struggle today.  Getting from point A to point B seems to require crossing mental mine field C.

So the word on twitter is that the lock out of the NFL officials may be ending.  I suppose the complete slap in the face to the integrity of the game and the shitting upon football fans everywhere finally wore the league out.  I don’t write about football much.  Mostly because I generally don’t pay any attention to it.  I’m not much of a fan, but I have watched a bit this year just to see what the horrible replacement officials would screw up next.  Now that this particular lock out is ending, I can go back to ignoring the NFL.

Oh that the same were true of the NHL.  Sure, the two sides are meeting on Friday to discuss non-core disagreement issues.  I suppose any progress is positive, but it is just so obvious that the NHL has no intention of resolving this dispute until after the players have started missing pay checks.  It is so clear that they have this target in sight, and that the league will stay dormant until that target approaches.  I am speaking, of course, of the winter classic.  If the league just happens to come back just in time to play that game, then it will be a complete slap in the face to everyone.  It will cheapen what previously had been a really great event and turn it into nothing more than a greed fest.  The hell with October, November, and December, they only care about the January pay day that is the winter classic.  It makes me sick.

The NFL and NBA had work stoppages last year.  The NFL and NHL have them this year.  Why do we put up with this garbage?  What is wrong with us that makes us let these actions continue?  What is wrong with them that makes them think they can treat us like this?

I think the reason why I am so completely exhausted might be because I am so thoroughly insulted.  I can’t take much more of this crap.

I just heard that the NHL and the NHLPA are going to meet on Friday.  Yippee.  Hooray.  Zippidy do dah.

What a joke.  10 days into the league’s precious lockout, with more and more players bailing to Europe every minute and the biggest breakthrough we have to talk about is the fact that they are going to blow off Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday before actually getting into the same room on Friday.  They have already cancelled everything through September 30th.  There is no way that the season could possibly start on time now without any training camps or preseason warm up games. 

Want to hear the funniest part of Friday’s planned meeting?

They haven’t decided where to hold it yet.  The league’s main office is in New York.  The union’s main office is in Toronto.  They are probably going to need months of negotiations in order to figure out who’s office to meet in, and then who is going to bring the sodas and what brand of potato chips they want and so on and so forth.

The whole situation is so shitty that I can actually hear the flushing sound of the entire sport going down the toilet.  I am surprised that the players haven’t begun forming their own league.  They could call it the Federal League (that is not a reference to the movie Slap Shot, it is a reference to baseball history).  It is time for the NHLPA to stop doing business with a league that is too stupid to police itself, so much so that days before instituting a lockout that expects to put a five year max on all player contracts, teams were giving players six year deals.  They are too stupid to survive.  The players should take matters into their own hands and form a new league.

To hell with the NHL.

Here are the dates Rush has played so far on the current tour (including tonight’s show which is still in progress):

How many of these shows have I managed to snag bootlegs so far?

9/7 in Manchester
9/9 in Washington
9/11 in Pittsburgh
9/13 in Indianapolis
9/15 in Chicago
9/20 in Columbus
and as of a few seconds ago, 9/22 in St Louis.

We’re still missing 9/18 in Detroit.

Come on, Detroit Rush fans.  Let’s get that show on line!

The kitty is acting awfully strange tonight.  I am starting to think she got into the brown acid.  That’s a shame because they made that stage announcement and everyone knows that the brown acid is bad.  I think we might have to call Wavy Gravy over to help talk her down.

(Woodstock humor never gets old.  Okay, so it’s been old for 40 years, but I’m still running with it.)