Opening Day 2012

Here's an interesting tidbit: The O's are 13-4 in Opening Days at Camden Yards including yesterday's 4-2 victory over the Twins. How is it that a team that has had 14 straight losing seasons has a .764 winning percentage when opening at home? Sure, there's home field advantage, and there's also the fact that they're starting their best pitcher. But so is the other team ... and let me tell you that in many years, the other team's best pitcher was better than ours. Here's the best explanation: the 13-4 record reflects the true Orioles and the rest of the decrepit 14 seasons has been massive underachievement. Until 2012.

Relationship advice

Every armchair psychologist (and real one) gives out advice on how to prevent or defuse fights in a relationship.

Here's an idea on how to start fights:

Respond to *anything* your mate says by narrowing your eyes, raising your eyebrows and saying in an agitated fashion, "What's *that* supposed to mean?"

Example:
loved one: "What's the plan today?"
you: "What's *that* supposed to mean?"

Incongruity?

You probably can't see this but this mini van has a window sticker that says "THANK YOU LORD FOR EVERYTHING BE IT GOOD OR BAD"

and then!

the license plate frame is 2 golden buxom naked ladies in profile kneeling with their flowing hair and feet meeting in the middle

Augustus Gloop redux

Owen and Jonah took a solo trip to the Westville Market yesterday. There, Owen used his entire allowance to purchase an obscene amount of candy and chocolate, which he apparently consumed over the span of an hour. And so ends the Allowance Experiment. Any guesses as to how much he spent?

Come Fly With Me

I'm heading up to Portland, ME in a little while for a conference tomorrow. Four-hour drive, which, for anyone who knows me knows that's well within my 'flying out the question' radius.

My friend and colleague who I'm driving up with suggested Monday that maybe he would fly us up...in a 2-seater propellor plane. As soon as these words came out of his mouth, my feet started tingling and I got a little woozy. Then he said, "But I haven't logged enough hours to fly in overcast weather and they're calling for rain so it probably can't happen." So..lemme get this straight ... you can be certified to fly only in ideal weather conditions?? What, pray tell, happens should the weather change mid flight?? Naturally, these and other catastrophic ruminations led to 2 nights of dreams: Tues night, my brother and I were riding our bikes to the meeting; Wed night, I was flying solo to the meeting.

Vacation week almost over

Owen climbed out of bed close to 8 but claimed he had been up for a while. He was was hiding in his room thinking we had forgotten to wake him up for school.

Beautiful people fail, too

Tom Brady and the Pats lost another Super Bowl to the Giants. That, you probably already knew. But did you hear Giselle Bundchen -- Tom's supermodel wife -- was caught on video saying at the postgame conference (paraphrasing) "He's not perfect; he can't throw the f$cking ball and f%^king catch it, too," a none-too-subtle critique of the Patriots' receivers dropped passes.

On the one hand, kind of cool that she can get that fired up about it; but, on the other hand, much less cool that she violated the 'we win together, we lose together' code of the NFL. After all, her hubby almost lost the AFC championship game for the Patriots with a positively mediocre performance that was only rescued by a desperately lucky defensive play and missed chip-shot FG at the end of the game.

But the real question -- Did Tom chide her for the tirade? Walking on egg shells there a bit...

T: "Baby, you can't say that."
G: "What, tell the truth? Why are you always telling me what to say? you can't tell me how to feel!! you can't force me to come to all these games, make me sit through all these press conferences and then tell me I don't have a right to say what I think!!"
T: [stares absently into his diet Dr. Pepper]