Holy freakin' crap.

They did it! They won! They really won! Holy freakin' crap!

Let's go Red Sox!

Wow, the guys really did it last night. They beat the Yankees and they're going to the World Series. I'm sure Amy and I woke the neighbors up by jumping around and yelling at midnite when the Sox won game 7. Later, we went outside to flip some cars over and light things on fire.

I am a Red Sox fan. My brother called me a pseudo-fan, but I think I can be listed as a fan. I would not call myself a hardcore Red Sox fan because I believe that title is saved for those folks who have cheered for the Sox for their entire lives.

The reason I like the Red Sox so much is because of the time I spent in Boston. Sure I grew up in Ohio, but I never really took much of an interest in baseball growing up. I was more of a football fan. And since I grew up in Dayton, there really wasn't a nearby team for me to become absorbed in. But that didn't stop my brother, who loves the Cincinnati Reds. He is what I would call a hardcore fan. Everything in his apartment is covered in Cincinnati Reds' paraphernalia -- from posters to bobbleheads to signed baseballs to pillows and so much more. It's insane.

Anyway, when I moved to Boston back in 2000, I was finally living in a city with a team. The friends I made in Boston were all real Sox fans. So I would watch the games with them, and I became very attached. Then later I got a job right by Fenway Park in downtown Boston. It's hard not to start loving a team when they're all you hear about and you're always watching their games with friends.

So I became a Red Sox fan. Call me a bandwagon fan if you want, but I did not start liking the Sox because they were doing so well. I mean, come on, if I were really a bandwagon fan - wouldn't I pick a team that I knew would always win? I see a lot of bandwagon Yankees' fans out there that are like that. They only like them because they win all the time.

Maybe deep down I'm drawn to the Sox because I'm used to having a favorite team let me down all the time. I mean, I am a dedicated Cincinnati Bengals fan. Yes, I can admit it. Although, at least the Red Sox make it to the playoffs here and there. The Bengals....not so much.

So I love the Sox. I can name the players and their positions. I know the line-up, I have favorite players (Go Trot!), and I was sad to see Nomar go. I've watched several games in Fenway Park. I watch their games on TV whenever they're on -- which unfortunately isn't too frequent anymore since I'm now down in Maryland.

And I love the die-hard Red Sox fans. Have you watched the fans in Fenway during games -- especially during playoff games vs. the Yankees? You can see the emotion on their faces, hands are held, eyes are shut, some heads are bowed as the fan watches through clenched fingers. That's true emotion. People are frickin' sacrificing chickens to get these guys to win. These folks put up with high blood pressure and heart attacks just about every season. I just don't see that same kind of emotion when they pan the Yanks' fans in the stands at Yankees Stadium.

So, way to do it, Sox! Way to shut the Yankees' fans up for once. Now, bring on the World Series.

Midnight Activities

At about midnight or so last night, our mischievous cat, Tuesday, was prowling. We awoke to the tremendous crash of glass breaking. Amy and I were both jolted awake, but still as we wondered whether we wanted to really find out what the cat did.

Eventually I said, "Well, I'm going to assume that whatever just shattered into a million pieces out there should be cleaned up before we wake up and walk through it in our bare feet."

Amy agreed, and we got up to investigate. I flicked the light on in the kitchen and found a terrified and wide-eyed cat in the doorway and the shattered remains of a glass on the floor. If Tuesday could speak she would have most likely used the phrase, "I didn't do it."

Also -- proof that I jinxed myself earlier in the day by thinking 'wow, we haven't seen any bugs in here in a while, that's great' -- I saw a roach scurry across the stove.

It was like midnight domestic bliss if anyone had walked in. I got out the vacuum while Amy hummed and cleaned off the stove. I still think Amy was asleep during the whole thing, because who really hums a cheery tune when cleaning up the grubby stove-top at midnight?

I finished vacuuming only to hear thumping on the floor from our downstairs neighbor. She must have had a broom and was banging it against her ceiling at the crazy neighbors who were vacuuming at midnight.

We had become the crazy neighbors. Granted, we had not turned the regularly normal practice of defrosting a chicken into an odd "Get to know your neighbor" situation, nor had we been holding band practice with a full sound system (like our current upstairs neighbors do), but to this woman for some strange reason her neighbors had decided at midnight that the apartment was just too dirty.

Oh and by the way, GO RED SOX!

Asexual Pride!

This article is awesome.

This is something I'd like to see extremists protest only because I want to hear the chants and see the posters they'd make up.

"GOD MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND -- WELL,...UM, NOT JUST ADAM BY HIMSELF!" they'd yell during Asexual Pride Celebrations.

And I love that there's an Asexual Visibility and Education Network. Not just for amoebas anymore, indeed.

Scrabble Sore Loser

At one point in my life, right during my upper years in high school and lower years in college, I was good at Scrabble. I'd always played against my mom, and while she used to consistently defeat me, I was improving. Then I hit those years and started defeating her as often as she defeated me. Yes, those were the days of innocent Scrabble -- when folks could just put down words and be happy for each other, and then go sit on the back porch and sip lemonade, and so on and so forth.

Then I played my college roommate Matt during my senior year of college. He played the meanest game of Scrabble I had ever seen. He played with strategy! He was blocking me and using my word placement as a way to rack up more points than I thought possible. Matt destroyed me by several hundred points. I was wounded, my Scrabble innocence ripped away from me. How could anyone play so maliciously and use word placement strategy and spend their free time reading the Scrabble Players' Dictionary?

But we played a few more times, and I slowly learned his way of Scrabble destruction. I still never beat him, but I was now only losing by around one hundreds points rather than several hundred.

When I went home one weekend, my mom and I played Scrabble again. I destroyed her. She seemed wounded. Who was this evil Scrabble strategist that had replaced her daughter? This was not the innocent and loving Scrabble player she had sent off to college several years back. No, I was now tainted.

And for several years now, I have been longing for a return to the Scrabble naiveity I once had with my mom. I have not won a game of Scrabble in at least five years. This is because my wife is a Scrabble Destroyer, and so are most of my friends who enjoy Scrabble.

I am a sore loser, too. I hate losing. Well, I don't mind losing a game or two here and there, you know - like my mom and I used to do. But I hate being constantly crushed at one game. Sure, I'll hold up the other games I do very well at -- "Yeah, you beat me at this, but I would clean your clock at AIR HOCKEY, BABY!!" or "Wait til we play TABOO, sweety, I'll DESTROY YOU!!" -- but those games just don't make me feel better about being a Scrabble Loser.

So, if anyone knows of a good Scrabble school or tutorial, pass it my way. It may be time for me to suck it up and do some Scrabble cross-training.

Pennsylvania Notes

There's nothing like barreling down the PA Turnpike through the Allegheny Mountains while singing along with Harry Belafonte music and munching on frosted shredded wheat.

When that happened last week, I noticed its weirdness, so I thought I'd blog it.

I was in Pittsburgh for a few days last week doing work stuff. I've been to Pitt before. I still can't decided if I like the city or not. The traffic sucks, but the city is beautiful from certain vantage points. Everything there seems dirty, but the rivers are gorgeous. So I'm in the middle. At least the drive out there was beautiful because it's just the right time of year to see all the leaves changing.

I also finally felt what it was like to have some roots somewhere. When introducing myself to folks out there, so many of them would say, "Oh, that's a good Pennsylvania Dutch name!" (referring to my last name) and then they'd list off how many relatives and people they knew with the same last name around the city. That's not a huge surprise, since my folks grew up in northwest PA. But because I moved around so much as a kid (Air Force brat), I never lived anywhere long enough to establish family roots. Most of my extended family is spread out across the US now.

Yet my parents and grandparents and more all grew up in northwest PA. To be somewhere where people recognize my last name as being from a particular area, and then having them also know tons of people with the same last name -- well, I think it's really cool. I felt like I had a heritage somewhere, you know? I don't know that I've ever felt like that before. Or maybe now I'm just appreciating it more. I know that when I've gone to see my grandma up there before (who's lived in the same small town for her entire life), if we go out to eat, she will usually end up introducing us to someone in town that we're somehow related to.

I've never met anyone with the same last name as me. The closest I'd seen is Jamie of the Seattle Mariners (not related to him, but that'd be cool). And then, lots of people, upon hearing my last name, say, "Oh, like Bill ?" You'd be surprised how many times I hear that. Anyway, my response to that is always, "No, no relation, he's plural and I'm singular."

Anyway, being in western PA was nice like that. Heck, I was probably related to some of those other that these people were listing off.

On a totally unrelated note, I also learned last week to never rent a "smoking" hotel room. The front desk clerk may tell you that it won't smell because they clean it -- but it will. I was tired of looking for other hotel rooms, so I just took their only available room -- which was a smoking room. Blech. I would avoid that if you're a non-smoker.

Clever Baby Daddy Advertising?

While driving through downtown Baltimore last night, I spotted a billboard that made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure what to make of it -- maybe nothing. This huge billboard showed a man and woman in the pose of laying on each other while on the beach, just like in the film "From Here to Eternity". Above it read the phrase "From here to paternity!" It was a huge DNA testing ad for some local DNA lab.

Thought I'd share the laugh.