A Balloon Boy game. Instant Classic.

@import ‘http://www.heyzap.com/elightbox/lightbox.external.css’; var heyzap_medium = new Heyzap( ‘heyzap_games_medium’, {“game”: “balloon-boy-game”} ); heyzap_medium.renderMini( null, ‘medium’ );heyzap.com – embed games

It snowed this morning.

Not a short little flurry, actual accumulating snow. Wet, heavy snow. Not a lot but enough to cover car windows.

It’s October 16th. We haven’t even reached Halloween yet and we got snow today. Traffic on route 93 was about 15 miles per hour slower than a normal Friday. All because of snow.

Last winter apparently has skipped over spring, summer, and fall and went straight into this winter. Crud.

Change of Subject

Last evening Jen heard some nasty high pitched squealing coming from the mini-van. We decided to take it to our regular mechanic today. I drove it there and when I left the driveway I could hear the noise too. 10 minutes later I couldn’t hear the noise anymore. All the way to the shop I couldn’t hear it. Isn’t that just the way?

Change of Subject

If this were a Star Trekian alternate universe I would not be at work today. I would also have a goatee and I would be wearing an ugly gold lame sash, but I would not be at work.

I would also be posting a picture that looks like this:

I would be out making the last, last minute wedding preparations for tomorrow’s big day. That’s right, today was our originally scheduled wedding rehearsal day. Today is the day that Alternate-Universe-Rob (goatee and all) and Alternate-Universe-Jen are holding their final wedding ceremony run through. I wish our Alternate-Universe-goatee-wearing-selves the best of luck. I can tell them honestly that this is going to be the happiest time of their lives and that married life is going to be fantastic.

I should send them a gift.

So my predictions for the Divisional playoffs weren’t all that great. I was wrong on the Red Sox vs Angels series, and that alone is enough to make the entire prediction game a massive failure. I picked those pricks from New York to beat the Twins so I was right on that one, as painful as that is. I was right to pick the Phillies over the Rockies, and I was wrong to pick the Cardinals over the Dodgers.

That’s a winning percentage of 50%. Not so great, not so bad.

Now we come to the League Championship Series. I will start in the National League. I was wrong to go against the Dodgers. Hell, I saw the Dodgers play in Dodger Stadium this summer, how could I have picked against them (Joe Torre and Manny Ramirez, that’s how). The Phillies were my first little league team. How can I root against them now?

Easy. I am picking the Los Angeles Dodgers to win this series. Being a repeat champ is probably the hardest thing to do in all team sports. The law of averages says the Phillies are going to lose. I even wore a Dodgers jacket to work on Tuesday. That’s how sure I am of the Dodgers making it to the World Series. (not really, the dodgers jacket just happened to be the closest jacket to the front door, but why spoil the drama?)

Now for the American League. The Red Soxless American League. The Boston-free American League. Damn it, it still hurts! Ever since Dave Henderson turned things around in 1986 the Angels (be they from California, Anaheim, or Los Angeles) have been Boston’s bitches. There, I said it. We’ve smacked them around and squashed them at all turns. We owned them.

Now? Now? Now that they’ve beaten us, what does it mean? It means I have to root for them because they are facing the friggin’ Yankees in the cursed second round. Damn you New York!

I am a 100% Angels fan now, just as I was a Twins fan in the last round. I root for two teams. The Red Sox and whoever beats the Yankees. It’s the Angels’ turn to try and beat the Yankees so I am totally in their corner.

Of course the Yankees are going to win the series. They are going to beat the Angels and then beat whatever National League team gets to be their cannon fodder in the World Series.

That’s my prediction. I seriously hope I am wrong about the American League, but my picks for the second round are the Yankees and the Dodgers. There, I said it. I can’t take it back now. DAMN IT I HATE THE YANKEES!

Go (urgh) Angels. (barf)

On the up side, the league will have a good marketing angle for the World Series regardless of who wins. If the Phillies win then the focus will be on the attempt to repeat. If the Dodgers win there will either be a cross town L.A. series against the Angels (please let this happen, please!) or the classic rematch of the old Yankees/Dodgers rivalry.

According to this site the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers have met in the World Series 11 times.

The Yankees won in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1977, and 1978 (Bucky Bleepin’ Dent!). The Brooklyn Dodgers won in 1955 and the Los Angeles Dodgers won in 1963 and the most recent meeting in 1981.

Here’s hoping the Dodgers take it in 2009 too.

Here’s hoping even more the rematch doesn’t happen because the Angels bounce the Yankees out in the second round.

Go Dodgers.
Go Angels.

Go Bruins.

October 17th is coming this Saturday. That was supposed to be the big day for the missus and me. Had we stuck to our original plans we would have been getting married this weekend.

We had the date set, a hotel hall booked, and all of the bigger details in place when it occurred to us (being the financially savvy folks we are… or should I say being the financially savvy folk my wife is) that we were going to completely empty all of our life savings in order to pull off the plans, and even then we might not have enough to bring it together. So we restructured everything. Different date, Smaller guest list, smaller hall, smaller catering, smaller everything. In the end we were both very happy with the way the happiest day of our lives turned out. The changes were proper and correct.

So October 17th became May 30th and all was right with the world.

But wouldn’t it be fun to do something on the 17th anyway? It was Jen’s grandfather’s birthday, which was why we chose that day in the first place, so it’s still a special day. Why not celebrate for the sake of celebrating?

Okay, let’s do it!

We thought of a couple of possibilities. Going up to the mountains for a second weekend in a row was one choice. A conversation with my mother on Monday sealed it though. She was telling us about her and my father taking a trip to Foxwoods. The seed had been planted and by Wednesday night the plans were in place. We are going to celebrate our would-have-been-wedding-day acting like high rollers at the ol’ casino in the southland. (well… southern Connecticut at least.)

Jen likes to play the tables. I like to watch Jen play the tables. My gambling experiences are very limited. I’ve been to the two CT casinos a couple of times each but have only played slots, and even then my maximum gambling investment was a $20 bill. Once at Mohegan Sun though I turned that into about $150. The other times I lost my investment all but instantly.

Jen, however, has been known to make a killing. The first time we went to Foxwoods together she quadrupled her max investment in less than an hour. She’s amazing!

So this weekend we’re taking a quick trip to the south. Sounds like fun right?

But wait! There’s more!

Jen is starting a new job next week. The office she is working in is in Massachusetts and it’s a brand new branch of a much larger company based in Indiana. She has to go to an orientation at the office in South Bend, IN. Home of Notre Dame University. The meeting is scheduled for the end of the month… and guess who is tagging along? That’s right, me! Your humble narrator. We fly in, Jen has her meeting, we fly out. Quick and simple. While she’s at work I will have to find something to do. I will most likely take my camera to the University and snap a shot of Touchdown Jesus. There is also a chocolate factory in town that sounds like a yummy way to fill a little time.

One month… two quick little travelin’ trips. Sounds like fun to me!

My wife loves me. Wanna know how I know? (did I mention this already?)

She sent me a Google Wave invitation. Yup, Mr and Mrs Robbie are now Wave users.

First impression? It’s neat, but I don’t know if it will replace email and instant messages the way the good folks at Google seem to think it will… or at least their marketing department is saying they think that way.

Is it a replacement for email? Probably not. Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s a little too easy to rewrite past messages and reply to things out of order and I can see it being fairly simple to lose your place and miss new messages… although there is a way to mark things as read or unread.

Is it a replacement for instant messages? That’s a little more of a possibility. The one thing missing is a notification. I seemed to catch it changing my title bar and the tab on firefox, but that is real easy to miss if you don’t have firefox up all the time. I did see something earlier on twitter that mentioned a firefox extension that might fix this oversite. There is also the possibility of it being added to the standard code as well if enough beta testers ask for it.

It’s kinda silly, I know, but from a net nerd’s point of view it’s also pretty cool. Granted I am easily amused by such things… still, I like it so far. My first impression is good.

One thing to note, I do not believe I have any invitations to give at this point. Jen got her invitation from Google and she had the option to invite other people. I don’t seem to have that option at this time, so don’t ask me to invite you. Granted, there are only four people reading this and two of them already have accounts… so I don’t expect to be flooded with requests.

We went up route 93 to route 3 to the Kancamagus Highway. We crossed from one end to the other, stopping a couple of times at scenic view spots. The weather wasn’t cooperating. We had rain and even some early October snow. It was also really cold. When we reached Conway we went to Cathedral Ledge and were completely blown away. The best pictures come from there. We then worked our way back South again and stopped at the Indian Head Resort for lunch and a view of the Indian Head.

Prepare to be bombarded with pictures… here they come!

The first batch come from various stops along the Kanc. Some of these were the same places we stopped at last year. Some others are from a visitors center in Conway, NH.

The sky tried to clear up a few times, but it never lasted long.

Now we come to Cathedral Ledge. There is a road to the top that was narrow and busy with cars parked all over the place. Lots of stupid people decided to visit the site that day and they annoyed us greatly, but the view made up for it.

There were a few groups of sanity-challenged climbers on a couple of the cliff faces.

My beautiful wife in front of a beautiful backdrop.

That’s all I am going to post today. Go to the flickr page to see a few more. I had a great time on this day trip. We went over 300 miles and it took the entire day, but we got to see some spectacular sites. Even better, we got to spend the day together as a family. It was great.

Here are a couple of pictures from the game on Saturday. It was the Devils home opener. When we left the game there was about five minutes left in the third and Worcester was up 4-2. The final score was 5-4 Worcester. We missed a bit of a come back. Oh well.

We saw the obligatory opening night pyrotechnic display that fills the entire building with smoke and makes it hard for anyone to see anything on the ice for the the first period or so.

The Worcester Sharks only needed 43 seconds to take the lead.

We didn’t sit in the old season ticket seats. We got seats near center ice, behind the Devils bench. Much closer than usual, but a few obstructed spots.

This guy went to school with me. Sort of. Ben Walter was a top scorer for the UMass Lowell Riverhawks during the time I had my radio show and DJ Deena and I had Riverhawks coach Blaise McDonald on the show for 30 minutes a week. Walter also used to play for the Bruins.

The first home-game-fight of the season. Somehow Lowell was stuck with a five minute major for fighting while Worcester got a two minute minor for roughing. Not sure how that happened.

The next three pictures are a burst capturing Worcester’s third goal at 13:31 of the second period. Damn it.

I told myself I was only going to post a couple of pictures, so I’m stopping here before things get out of control.

Leaf Peeping pictures to follow…

I’ll post more of these pictures when I get a chance, but we are on the last day of a fantastic three day weekend. Here are two of the things we did.

Geekboy loves his hockey.

Views that take your breath away.

More to come, but maybe not until tomorrow.

At the Indian Head Resort eating lunch in the shadow of a mountain with my family. We’ve gone 200+ miles today and many more to go. Lots of fantastic sites.

I’m waiting for the kids karate class, sitting in the parking lot listening to Stephen King’s “The Wastelands” on tape. For the record I also finally finished “Duma Key” today.

Jen is going to Rochester to pick up her mother and step father. They are coming over for the night so we can all go leaf peeping up in the White Mountains tomorrow.

Tonight we are going to the Tsongas Arena in Lowell to see the Devil’s home opener.

There will be some other things in there; dinner, some games with the kids.

It’s going to be one of those ridiculously busy weekends that are a completely fantastic good time.