He Knew He Was Right

Ok, with football season underway as noted in my previous entry, and lots of plans this season, I thought it would be good to post my current list of football stadiums I've visited. I'm not sure how MS tables will play with Blogger, but there really is only one way to find out... 1988 Giants / Jets † Giants* Many for both 1990 11/4 Browns † Municipal BUF42-CLE0 11/5 Colts † Hoosierdome NYG24-IND7 1991 9/8 Bengals † Riverfront HOU30-CIN7 9/15 Bears Soldier Field CHI20-NYG17 1993 12/11 Redskins RFK NYJ3-WAS0 1997 12/7 Ravens Memorial Stadium BAL31-SEA24 1998 11/1 Redskins Jack Kent Cooke* (Fedex) WAS21-NYG14 2000 11/19 Ravens PSINet* BAL27-DAL0 12/3 Chargers Qualcomm SF45-SD17 2001 12/2 Dolphins Pro Player MIA21-DEN10 2002 10/20 S...

MLB unveils schedule for 2012 season | MLB.com: News I'm really just testing this "Share this" tool bar, but the release of the MLB and NFL schedules does make my heart beat a bit quicker. It makes me dream of road trips, and visits to those ballparks I desperately want to visit. Not to mention those others I'd really like to visit. And, those ballparks I'd like to see again. It's three teams to go--Houston, San Diego, and Arizona. And, Miami has added a new ballpark, so I'll need to get there one day, before or after I get to the new ones that have been built in Detroit, Minnesota, and Cincinnati. It's also been too long since I've been to Camden Yards, Fenway, and Wrigley. But, hey, football season is just kicking off, and I have some more immediate dreams to fulfill...

There really was this nice stretch of weather in New York in September of 2001. I don’t remember if it was Saturday September 8 or Sunday September 9, but I know I was at Jones Beach with friends. A couple of us took a walk from Field 4 to the West End jetty. It was perfectly clear, and I remember being amazed that the Twin Towers were visible on the horizon, some 25 miles to the west. They weren't something I saw often, but I saw them one last time, from a distance, that weekend. That weekend was also the start of the NFL season, one of promise, as my Giants had surprised many with a trip to the Super Bowl earlier that year. Later in the week, I was to fly to New Orleans, going to a Saints game and knocking the last continental state I hadn’t visited from my to-do list.   I remember staying up late on Monday, watching those same Giants lose a Monday Night Football game to the Broncos. Still, I woke up Tuesday morning and got to work in plenty of time for my 8:00 start...

In the early spring, I spend a lot of time looking at the baseball schedule, planning trips--scheming really. I'm nearly finished with the first objective of my ballpark mission: to see every team play a home game. I may very well complete that next season. When the football schedule follows a month or so later, well, I start drooling. With baseball, the main challenge has been figuring out how to align multiple games in the same trip. For example, wanting to see both Angels and Dodgers home games this year, I was restricted to one weekend where they were both home. With football, there are only 17 weekends with which to work, and holidays and weather start becoming a factor later in the season. However, during the four weekends where the MLB and NFL seasons overlap, a savvy fan starts noting weekends where, say, the Tampa Bay Rays and Bucs, the Colorado Rockies and Denver Broncos, the St. Louis Cardinals and Rams, etc, are both home. And, if one is a fan of the NHL too, well, ...

I knew that a sizable earthquake hit Colorado this morning, and that it was considered unusual. I never, though, got around to reading about it or finding it on TV or online. In fact, I mostly forgot about it by this afternoon. So, there I was, plugging away with work at my computer desk. I didn't remember starting it, but at some point early this afternoon I leaned back for a really good stretch. Really, really good. I felt a little shaking, and thought it was just me until realizing that things around me were rattling. I straightened up from my stretch, and the same items continued to rattle. As I didn't hear a helicopter, or the usual home-rattling suspects, I suspected a small earthquake. Remembering that this iPad features a pretty nice earthquake app (QuakeWatch), I ran over to it to see if the app registered anything, or might have info on the Colorado quake. --   Magnitude: 5.8 Location: Virginia Time: Tue, Aug 23, 2011 1:51:04 PM EDT GMT: Tue, Aug 23, 2011 17:5...

When one of my friends stopped by my place a few months ago, he looked at my CD rack and said something like, "Dude, what is this, the 90s?" He didn't take notice of any of the collection, let alone the beautiful construction of the rack. No, just that a CD collection is considered outdated. That rack is a woodworking project I did with my Dad, constructed from oak, ending with a nice 10-shelf housing, with each shelf holding 100 disks. There's also room for cassettes, as a bunch survived each move I've made. I had peaked at about 250 back in the late 80s, when I made the switch to CD. The ones I had left were double stacked on the bottom shelf, out of view, and perhaps saved me the ignominy of a "Dude, what is this, the 80s" retort. I liked cassettes. You could purchase them by the album, or record your own songs on to them. They were great for the car. They didn't scratch easily like CDs, and could be changed while driving without ever taking you...

A couple of my blog posts have been extracted and recrafted (chopped down) for posting here from a much larger travel log I started compiling about six years. The moose tales from last year come to mind first. When a friend mentioned that she was going to Prince Edward Island last week, I felt compelled to tell her of my misadventure when traveling there in 1997. So, here is another extraction from that log that I thought worth sharing... ...[From Newfoundland] the ferry ride back to Nova Scotia was without incident. Prince Edward Island was my next destination. Prior to the spring of 1997, the only way to get to PEI in a car was via one of two north–south running ferries—one on the east side of the island that connected with Nova Scotia, and one on the west side that connected with New Brunswick. A bridge, however, had been recently constructed, and was replacing the west-side ferry, much to the chagrin of the ferrymen who were losing their jobs, and some residents of the...