Twice In Four Days?

Good evening everyone.  I thought that I'd write again since I'm feeling a little more rested.  Twice in four days, I know - call Guinness...  I'm just watching a little 'Two and a Half Men' and 'The Big Bang Theory' and whatever else catches my eye until I fall asleep tonight.  This is the eve of classes starting on the University of Texas at Austin campus tomorrow, the proverbial "quiet before the storm" if you will...  This is what the trash dumpsters currently (this afternoon) look like at my apartment complex, if you need any proof that the students have returned to Austin...

Photographs of trash.  And just when you thought that my blog couldn't possibly get any better...  Speaking of trash, I bet a little preseason football last night (the baby bets, thank goodness).  Last night I had bet on the Bengals (+3) and also wagered that Cincinnati would score over 18.5 points against Tampa Bay.  By the way, if any of you have ever competed at Fan Duel or Draft Kings, I'd like to get your feedback on those sites.  I've been seeing A LOT of commercials lately as the football season approaches...

Speaking of football, again, my friend Joey, my brother Pete, and myself will be giving you weekly football predictions at one of my other blogs, Coach's Parlay Card.  Regarding my picks, maybe this is where I should have inserted the photo of the trash...  ;)  Actually, I'm still living on my prediction that Kentucky was overrated and would not win the NCAA hoops title this past spring.  Didn't even make it to the championship game...  :)

Alright, now to get that trash out of your mind.  My friend Tim posted a nice picture today from Franconia Notch, where isn't too terribly far from my hometown in New Hampshire...

It's not year-round snow up there...  ;)  And this facebook share came from my friend Brigette, who it seems I'm stealing as much from now as anyone on social media...

Another one of my pet peeves, people who don't use their turn signals and nearly kill me...  Yeah, I really need to start getting my rants out there more...  :)

That's it for tonight gang.  I just wanted to check in real quick.  Have a great week and I'll see you soon!

Hopeless

"You know it's hot when the highlight of your day is someone bringing you a freeze pop..."
 -Destiny Perez-




Good afternoon everyone.  It appears that this is going to be my SIXTH post since my entry on March 31st.  I definitely have to start pacing myself...  Ironically, this will also be the post where my total pageviews go over the 90,000 mark, which is an incredible milestone considering the fact that I don't write.

As a potentially classic Men's Final at Wimbledon plays out of the t.v. beside me, I guess that I'll write a little.  I'll begin with work, which has been extremely busy since I took my new job at the start of March.  In my job with ITS, we see a huge number of projects during the summer as you might imagine, because that's when the students are gone and we can do more work without disturbing them.  We do work in preparation for their return to campus, in addition to everything that happens in and around the football stadium, for the return of Longhorn Football in early September.  We already had several ongoing projects this year before the summer rush hit, so I've been working quite a bit.  During the past week, I worked 3.5 hours of overtime on Tuesday and Wednesday, 3 hours on Thursday, and 2.5 extra hours on Friday.  I also expect a lot more overtime before the students return to campus.  Don't get me wrong, UT has summer school, but there are over 50,000 students wandering around here during the long semesters...

In the world of sports, I still plan on doing football picks again.  These will be moved to one of my newer blogs (don't worry, you haven't missed anything - I don't write in my newer blogs either), Coach's Parlay Card.  I believe that Joey still plans on making picks with me.  I've barely cracked the covers on my college and pro football magazines, for what you'd expect from me anyway.  In baseball, the Red Sox and Yankees will be on TBS in about five minutes.  The Sox are 5 1/2 games back if I'm correct (the Yankees in first), so the whole division will be within 4 1/2 games of the lead at the All-Star Break should Boston win today.  The Sox were favored to win the division (and more) coming into the season, so the second half could be very interesting...  And of course, there's the Spurs offseason.  It's interesting to see where free agents want to sign, and the jerks on the teams that they're deciding not to play with...

Despite the moniker of this blog, I've spent nearly all of my free time at home recharging from work, so I don't have tons to report about San Marcos or Austin.  My friend Cindy from campus put her house up for sale recently, and has had people coming to look at it virtually IMMEDIATELY after it listed, so the housing/rental market here in Austin is still ridiculously strong, a fact that I curse every time that I write my monthly rent check.  Following along on facebook, it seems that people were incredibly generous in the wake of the late spring flooding in San Marcos and Wimberley, as I saw that all kinds of benefits were held for victims.  In some San Marcos and sports news, the Texas State Bobcats will be opening up their football season at Florida State University.  That should be interesting...  :)

Hopefully that's enough to tide you over for a week, or a month, or longer...  :)  Have a great week and I'll talk to again sometime...  ;)

    

BRING ME ANOTHER SMURF!

"And whenever you're dark inside, don't let go, no, don't let go, remember there's rain, and there's candy, and Christmasy winter snow, snow, snow..." -Blue October- (For My Brother)

"And this is how you remind me..., this is how you remind me of what I really am, this is how you remind me of what I really am..." -Nickelback- (This Is How You Remind Me)

"Being polite is so rare these days that it is often confused with flirting..." -Spirit Science- (via Chris Abramski)




Good evening everyone.  We have a lot to cover on this Tuesday night, with the usual segues and stolen material from my friends showing up in force.  Let me start off by mentioning that my friend Chris brought his "'A' Game" to facebook this week, and that I'm stealing from him twice in this post.  That quote right above this paragraph was shared by Chris earlier in the week, and it was just SPOT ON...  I'm a pretty good guy (despite what you may have heard), and I've seriously had girls go so far as basically flipping out on me because I was nice to them, and I was just like "WOW..."  We'll get back to Chris later in this entry...

My friend George posted a Nickelback status today, and it reminded me (pun intended, but not initially) of the lyrics quoted above.  Back when I used to run (I completed three marathons back in the day - presently my brother and I let our sis Whitney do the majority of the running in our family), I'd often have the lyrics of that song playing in my mind as I strode around 'Bikini Hill' and the rest of San Marcos, America.  As it turns out, I may be able to hang out with George and an all-star cast (including, but probably not limited to, Jackie, Nick, Floyd, and Beau) this weekend at a crawfish boil as South By Southwest (SXSW) kicks off here in the ATX.  SXSW is a little festival held in Austin during spring break every year that includes a little music, movies, celebrating, etc...  Oh, and CRAWFISH, which I happen to love...

Speaking of spring break, the weather here earlier in the week had me recalling that set of Blue October lyrics above.  BOY did we have some rain here yesterday!  I have complained countless times about the winter weather in my hometown in New Hampshire, but I don't think that I'm cut out for living in Seattle either.  Rainy and dreary and rainy and dreary...  It's great when you want to sleep in on a Sunday morning, but it gets old pretty quick.  Well, I'm more than happy to inform you that the ten-day forecast for Austin has our highs in the low 70's and our low's in the low 50's...  :D  That should make for great weather as SXSW kicks off, and I'm ready to celebrate, only having my 'New Employee Orientation' to attend on Monday...

As poker players and sportsbooks throughout the desert cry, I'm probably not going to be moving to Las Vegas anytime soon because I received a job offer that was too good to resist.  The change in my job classification will have me attending the orientation on Monday, so some low-key partaking of crawfish with friends this weekend is probably in order.  While we're on the subject(s), we can't mention crawfish or new jobs without congratulating our friend Alyssa (remember, she's the one who doesn't peel crawfish quite as fast as me - that's my story and I'm sticking to it) on her new job.  Congratulations Alyssa!  :D

Okay, let's see what else my friends have done this week...  Well, we were talking about food.  My friend Claudia shared this little peanut butter cup the other day...

"Reese's who?" was all that I could think to ask, as this thing weighed in at 230 pounds.  Turning our attention to breakfast, my friend Susan shared this photo this morning...

Susan's description was "Something does not belong here.  #boys #dinosaursforbreakfast"  My immediate thought was "fossil fuel."  Do you see what I did there?  I can be semi, sort-of-clever every once in a while, kinda...  ;)  And then there's Brittany, who has probably managed to get herself in this blog almost as many times as Alyssa.  Although we don't have Brittany posing with Emmitt Smith this time around, she did share this informative photo about beverages...

And that's why we keep Brittany on the payroll...  ;)  I told you that we'd get back to Chris, and if you were wondering about the title of tonight's post, here ya go...

This is another photo that Terrell Suggs (Baltimore Ravens) posted, and I don't know who initially looks at this photo and comes up with that caption, but it did make me smile (however unfortunate that may be)...  :)

As Gonzaga just handily disposed of BYU in the West Coast Conference title game, let me take this timely opportunity to remind you about one of my other blogs.  You can find yesterday's post, 'Kentucky Is Going To Lose (& Gonzaga Will Too)' at 'Coach Goes Viral'  In this entry you can read my thoughts as to why Kentucky won't go unbeaten this season, and why Gonzaga shouldn't be a #1 or #2 seed (and will also lose).  Currently I'm chatting daily sports with my brother, but Joey and I will be back at 'Coach's Parlay Card' with basketball picks once the 'Sweet Sixteen' begins.  I'm actually making almost nightly picks there now, but visitors are still struggling to find my fledgling site...  :)

That's it for tonight, but I hope that all of you have a good one, and I'll see you soon!

Spring Forward

"Thanks to everyone who posted on my birthday.  To the rest of you...  You are dead to me..."
-Pete P. Peters-

"I think my ponytail is on too tight..." -Yvonne Gonzales- (Yvonne's response to not getting a reference I made).

Grrouchie:  "Excuse me, where do you have the ears of corn?"
Smith's Employee:  "Umm, I don't even know what that is..." -Grrouchie-

"No matter how much times passes, great friends always pick up right where they left off..."
-Summer Rodriguez-

"This is what happens when it snows in Texas..." -Gisele Verissimo-


Good evening everyone.  Long time, no see...  With the weather that we've had recently (and that we're forecast to have this weekend), I've pretty much accepted the fact that I'll stay home this weekend.  It's not like there's nothing on t.v., or that I have nothing to do here, but I'm ready for our Texas winter to be over.  My friend Verissimo posted this photo with that quote above when nasty weather hit the Metroplex (Dallas-Fort Worth area) recently...

Click on that photo and you'll see a lot of bad news for drivers.  You can see from the top of the photo that this took place at about noon also.  Here in Austin (and at the University of Texas more specifically) we've had delayed starts to workdays because the biggest threat to drivers has been ice in the early morning while the temperatures are still below freezing.  It's not supposed to get quite that cold this weekend, but it will still be cool enough, and we have an 80% chance of rain on Sunday, followed by a 100% chance on Monday.

Like I said a minute ago, there's plenty to watch on t.v., and I have plenty to do.  The conference tournaments are starting up in men's college basketball, and I still have my NHL and NBA.  I'm noticing just now that my Bovada account is down only $2.24 from what it was on February 8th (with no deposits, and with microbet upon microbet).  I still haven't downloaded the Bovada poker again, but that's something that might happen pretty soon.  As always, I have plenty that I can do around the apartment.  This isn't even taking into account the blog reading that I've gotten behind on.  It seems that's almost all of my fellow bloggers (listed on the right) have made at least one post that I haven't read yet (while some have posted several times).  A vast majority of the time I will comment on my friends' entries after they have posted, just to let them know that I've stopped by at the least.  There hasn't been much commenting on my part this week...  :)  This just shows a bunch of laziness on my part, especially since I didn't have to report to work until 1:00 p.m. yesterday...  As a preferred night owl, my first move when discovering a delayed start at work the next day is too stay up later that night.

In addition to having reading to catch up on, I've also been neglecting all of my blogs.  I waited so long to rant about Gonzaga not deserving a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament that they went and lost a game before I did.  While I'm talking about college basketball (and this isn't a rant), I'll go on record right now with my belief that I don't think that Kentucky will go unbeaten this season.  The Wildcats have been tested a few times in a conference that isn't very tough.  If Kentucky played in the ACC, they'd probably have more than one loss already.

Since I mentioned it, I've been pondering downloading the Bovada poker (just for research for my poker blog, of course)...  :P

I think I'm gonna let y'all off the hook for now, but you may see me here again this weekend.  Have a good one until then, and remember to set your clocks ahead an hour before you go to bed on Saturday night!