The second and final part of my Football series, in honor of the new football season...

In college, our Christian fellowship had this brilliant idea: why not have a football game of seniors vs. everyone else?  And to make it interesting, let's play tackle football, with linemen and everything!  Yeah, what a great idea!  Not.  I was on the senior team, and they asked me to be their quarterback.  I wasn't super excited about playing tackle football again, but since my manhood would have been challenged if I declined, I accepted.  Bad move... 

In honor of the new football season, I shall blog about football.  About my experience playing football.  Tackle football.  And let me just start by saying that my experience with tackle football has not been good... 

I just realized that I haven't posted anything for over a week!  And it's not like I've been super busy or anything, I just haven't had anything happen that is blog-worthy.  Trust me when I say that the scarcity of posts is not from a lack of effort.  People who know me will assure you that I'm always searching for new topics to write about.  For example, in the middle of conversations, I've been known to shout out, "THAT is totally bloggable..." 

This is a blog about several random things...

1.  I am a geek by nature.  Jocelin is not.  Before we met, she barely knew anything about computers or electronics.  In fact, she never even surfed the web, which is utterly unimaginable and altogether unthinkable to me.  But now, Jocelin has totally geeked out.  These days, on her days off, the first thing she does in the morning is check her email.  Then she'll spend an hour or so checking everyone's blog or surfing the web.  On top of that, she knows how to create her own blog, how to manipulate digital photos, and how to FTP!  And check out her multiple monitor setup in the picture below.  My, my.  How far she has come.  I'm so proud of her!  BTW, all of this is so I can re-make her into my own image.  And so far, everything is going exactly as planned.  Muhahahahaha...  (It has only taken me 7 years.)

For the last six weeks, I have been eating really poorly.  I'll blame it on all the guests we've had at our house.  While hosting Jocelin's cousins, my sister and her boyfriend, my mom, and other miscellaneous friends over this period of time, we've eaten out ALOT.  Alot more than usual.  It's no surprise that I've gained five pounds.

Another factor contributing to my poor diet is all the groceries my mom bought when she was here.  Seeing that we didn't have alot of food in the house (I like to say that we "excel at inventory management"), my mom went  out and bought a bunch of groceries.  And then she left it all here when she left.  Stuff like triscuits, juice, a cheese ball, bagels, pasta, waffles, a big ol' chocolate bar, and syrup.  None of these things are on our normal grocery list.  We don't normally consume them, mainly because we try to watch our caloric intake. 

For several summers now I've been bragging to my friends that I've never watered my lawn.  Ever.  Even though I have a sprinkler system, I've never watered it.  To save money, as usual.  And my lawn has always endured.  It has always stayed green.  Until now.  This summer has been so frickin' hot that my lawn couldn't take it anymore and turned yellow.  So after testing out the sprinkler system and fixing the bad heads, I started watering my lawn yesterday.  And this morning I went outside, checked the grass, and it was wet.  And that made me feel good. 

These past few weeks I have been teaching Jocelin how to drive a stick.  We've been married for 4 years, and before now she could never drive my car.  I had been wanting to teach her forever, but I was lazy.  And her unwillingness to try also didn't help.  But the combination of (1) higher gas prices and the (2) amount of mileage on her old Lexus finally forced us to take action.  (This is one of the ways we are responding to higher gas prices.  See my blog on 08/18/2005).

IMO, Jocelin is an aggressive driver.  She's the type that gets upset at bad drivers.  If there's a grandpa or grandma driving really slow in front of her, she'll make sure to make a comment to me about it before whipping around them.  If there's a long line of cars waiting to exit the freeway (think Parmer exit going north on Mopac during traffic hour), she'll zip past all of them and cut in at the last minute.  When I'm waiting to make a turn and yielding to oncoming traffic, I'll hear the following, "Aw, man, you shoulda gone then!  I TOTALLY woulda made it..."  So, yes, by my standards, Jocelin is an aggressive driver.  At least in her Lexus she is... 

A couple weeks ago at the Austin Stone the sermon was on John 14:15, which says, "If you love me, you will obey what I command."  I always thought this meant something like: "If you love me, you will show me that you love me by doing what I say."  I would read it and think to myself, ok, if I really love God, I gotta get to work, dig deep, and do my best not to sin.  Because that's what "obeying what I command" means, right?  It means not sinning.  And if you haven't figured it out yet, not sinning is freakin' hard. 

This is the 4th article of the "Deals" series...

These days, most of us have high-speed internet connections.  If you do, I would highly recommend looking into switching your home telephone service to a Voice Over IP (VOIP) provider (and still keep your current number).  I've been using Vonage for over 6 months now, and I love it.  It totally works for us, and it's alot cheaper than SBC.  Plus, we get alot of extra features we didn't get with SBC, like Caller ID and Voicemail. 

This is the 3rd article of the "Deals" series...

We don't go to Blockbuster anymore.  $4.50 for a movie rental is just a ripoff.  We don't do NetFlix either, because we can't watch that many movies per month to justify the cost.  A few years ago, we signed up for the Blockbuster deals where we got 10 rentals plus the Lord of the Rings DVD for $25.  Right after that, there was a identical promotion for 10 rentals plus the Finding Nemo DVD.  The only catch was you had to use the 1 of the 10 rentals EACH WEEK, which means we had 20 weeks in a row where we had to rent a movie.  And let me just tell you that got to be pretty painful.  After week 8, we couldn't find anything else we wanted to watch, so we had to start watching crap like Pearl Harbor...