We are the mundane
OK – so I made up a word. Just a catch all category for off-the-wall and weird stuff
No, it’s my beautiful house under construction, circa 1908.
The woman we bought it from sent us this and a few others.
The second photo here is from 1912. Notice the little sapling tied to the stake in the front yard? It’s now the 60 foot pecan tree that shades us from the afternoon sun.
I know some of you have seen this picture before, but I wanted to get it on here for posterity. We had our first substantial snowstorm overnight, and Smashmouth and I were out at 6am clearing the driveway and sidewalks.
Speaking of posterity, I’m archiving the blog on a regular basis and will occasionally distribute CDs to family members. So, if you want some mundane event or milestone or whatever recorded, put it up here. Our great-grandkids will be able to check it out someday.
Remember, “We are the mundane!”
I thought we would all get a kick out of this. Seems to be a real article from Housekeeping Monthly, 1955.
Click on photo to see fullsize and read.
Are IPods really the way to go? I was in Best Buy last weekend looking for a set of replacement headphones for Brandon’s IPod Shuffle. The only ones (that were Apple certified and that matched the original ones) were sold with a useless remote control and were priced at $45. I was highly annoyed that I couldn’t find the replacement headphones sold by themselves. It was at this moment when I realized that I had become a victim of marketing. It never even occured to me that there may be other options out there for MP3 players. So, I began to look around. I noticed several on the market and all at significantly lower prices than IPod. So what’s so special about these fruity little devices anyway? Why should I give them my money?
Some of you may remember my campaign last spring to name the new State College minor league baseball team the Sliders. My nominee had been one of seven (the others were Black Bears, Copperheads, Miners, Mountain Bats, Ridge Riders, and Stags) selected to be semifinalists. I put some serious effort into promoting my choice (I even handed out business cards promoting the name)
Let’s just say that my suggestion didn’t meet with universal acclaim (Click here to read a local writer’s opinion),
Evidently, team managemant felt the same as the above writer because they wound up throwing out all seven of the semifinalists and starting over with a new list of finalist. They were Anglers, Coalys, Furnace, Haymakers, and Spikes.
The grand announcement of the winner was today. And the winner is, drumroll please:
All I can say is “boring”.
Has anyone seen the car commercial where people are claiming you can see a ghost. I think it’s kind of a stretch. Kind of like the weeping Madonnas that appear overnight on walls and such.
Take a look at:
Penn State has been receiving lots of good press because of their spectacular implementation of the “White Out” theme at the Ohio State game this year.
The reality of it all is that we really weren’t the ones that started it. We kind of borrowed the idea from Michigan who has been alternating “Maize Outs” and “Blue Outs” at the football games for four years. The Michigan football team picked up the “Maize Out” idea from the Michigan Hockey team.
The Michigan hockey team undoubtedly got the idea from the Winnipeg Jets who created the promotion for the 1986 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
One of the more effective color implementations was a Texas A&M “Red, White, and Blue Out” shortly after 9/11.
However, as good as out “White Out” was, it really can’t top the Michigan “Maize Out” shown below.
it’s time to shift to my “other job”.
I’m fortunate in that my two passions don’t overlap their seasons. Warm weather months get dedicated to golf – I’m a little off this year with only about 80 rounds played, normally I’d hit over 100 but the asthma knocked me out for a month. Cold weather months see my focus switch to Penn State basketball (practice started 12 days ago).
A friend of mine, Tim Beidel, runs a website, PennStateHoops.com, dedicated to the Nittany Lion basketball program. Tim resides in Portland Maine and started the site years ago as a way of remotely keeping up with the basketball program. He was frustrated that he had a really hard time finding information anywhere about Penn State basketball team and realized that others must be in the same boat so he started the site.
I started buying season basketball tickets when the school built our basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center in 1995. Like Tim, I lived in New England and couldn’t find any info on PSU basketball. I started trolling around the web and stumbled onto his site then. It was a godsend for those of us looking for PSU BB info. I started hanging around the site then, occassionally posting to the site forum.
A few years down the road, I met Tim and we hit it off (90%+ of the people on these boards I wouldn’t want anything to do with but Tim is an exception). We’ve been able to get together once or twice a year since then, either for a summer golf tournament, fall football game, or winter basketball game. Despite Tim being a married non-drinker and me the polar opposite we get along quite well (in addition to sharing a common perspective on Penn State basketball, our political and social views seem to jibe 100%).
Tim runs the website as a hobby and it’s become quite popular among the PSU hoops community. Fortunately, Tim has been able to keep the lunatic fringe often found on internet boards at bay (he even got some nice props in a story by a Harrisburg sportswriter). Penn State has numerous former players playing professional ball in Europe who use the site to keep up to date with the team. We also have recently been recruiting heavily in Europe – we have three players on the squad from overseas – and their friends and families use the board to keep track of their hometown heroes.
Over the years my contribution to the board has grown. In addition to regularly posting on the aforementioned forum, I have assumed responsibility for tracking our recruiting efforts by maintaining the “UncleLar Recruiting Matrix”. The matrix is a compilation of published reports of whom Penn State is targeting with their recruiting.
By NCAA rule, a school’s coaching staff can’t comment on anyone that they are recruiting. That creates a huge void which is filled by numerous internet recruiting services (for both football and basketball). The two biggest are the Rivals Network and the Scout Network. Each of these networks is a conglomeration of individual school sites which are run by local professionals. Blue White Illustrated runs the Penn State site on the Rivals Network while Fight On State is the Scout Networks Penn State site. Both of those websites are run by local professionals who also publish local magazines.
However, this area is so football oriented that staffs of BWI and FOS give short shrift to basketball, even during basketball season. That has opened up a niche within a niche for Tim’s board and he is able to put together a better product as a hobby than either of the professional organizations can. As evidence,
Tim’s board receives 10 times the traffic that either the BWI basketball board or the FOS basketball forum does and my recruiting matrix is also more complete that either the BWI recruiting table or the FOS table.
With basketball season just around the corner (we have an exhibition game next Thursday), basketball recruiting activities will pick up and I can settle into my “second job” just as my golf “job” winds down.
but I’m too damn lazy to go out and take photos. Woke up today with about an inch of snow on the ground and more falling. Fortunately, the ground temp is above freezing so most of it is melting but it is sticking to vegetation.
By now the temperature have risen enough (my outdoor thermometer says 34) that it’s turned to rain but the higher elevations are getting hit with snow – the forecast for the area says the precip will shift back and forth from rain and snow all afternoon with accumulations up to 6-9 inches in the surrounding mountains.
Many of the trees in the area still have a substantial number of leaves still on them so I expect numerous power outages from falling limbs as the snow accumulates on the tree branches.
This is the earliest significant snowfall that I can remember for a while.
ED Note: I knew if I waited long enough I could find shots on the web. Here’s one from on campus – to see more go here.
