augiewan.com

As I was hunting through my hard drive for an image I needed for work, I came by one that I haven’t seen in a LONG time. It’s Shane and I hiking in “garb” we brought along with us on a trip after I graduated High School. This has always been one of my favorite images of the two of us and you can click for a larger view…

We were the best of friends through our late teens and twenties (my mom called us two peas in a pod), but somewhere along the course of us working together, worshiping together, and playing together, our lives took separate paths. I don’t think we talked to each other more than a dozen times during the last year we lived in the same town, and it’s sad that it happened the way it did.

Every now and then, someone we both knew asks, “Oh man, what’s ol’ Shemp up to these days?” and I quietly reply that I don’t know. I always get the exact same look, the one that you’d expect to see on the face of someone who just found out that a close family member died. I add that I haven’t heard from him in over 8 years. But you know what? He hasn’t heard from me either…

After being really pumped at the beginning of the season, I’m completely deflated after this past weekend. The season started for me to be the first season in which I was actually rooting for 2 teams. I’ve been a life-long Packers fan and will continue to be regardless of the direction they take in the coming years. I also became a huge Brett Favre fan over the years he played, so I was really rooting for him and the Jets as well. The Pack seemed to be pretty sturdy at the beginning of the season even without Brett, but after the defeat by Dallas they just fell apart. They were still a good team, but they seemed to lose the swagger after that loss and didn’t have the confidence to finish games. The Jets didn’t start out great but started looking great in the middle of the season. Their wins over the Titans and the Pats made them look like serious contenders, but after that it was like a completely different coaching staff was calling the games. They didn’t do anything right. They didn’t run, they didn’t rush the passer, they didn’t stop the run…

The end of the regular season brought it’s misery with the Jets just missing out and the Pack being set for watching from home for weeks now. But I still had some teams I was at least interested in watching. I think the fact that the Dolphins were actually acting like men playing a GAME and having fun with it was exciting. Since the Jets weren’t going, I figured I’d root for Miami. There was also the Colts, who I’m no huge fan of, but my wife really likes them so we were kind of pulling for them too. Especially if it could mean watching Peyton beating down his stuck-up little brother…

So yeah, the first week of the playoffs has come and gone. Fish got killed, Colts forgot to show up against an inferior team, and here’s what we have…

Baltimore Ravens at Tennessee Titans
Yawn… I can’t think of a game better suited to put me to sleep…

Arizona Cardinals at Carolina Panthers
This will likely be good game and I’ll root for the Cardinals. I like Fitzgerald and I’d like to see James get one more crack at it after the Colts did him SO wrong a few years back…

Philadelphia Eagles at New York Giants
Hmmm…. Two teams I can’t stand at all. Hope they beat the living snot out of each other…

San Diego Chargers at Pittsburgh Steelers
Did I say I couldn’t stand the last two? Well I HATE the bolts and their cocky QB Phillip Rivers, so I guess I’m pulling for the Steelers in this one.

So as little interest as I have in any of these, that’s where I stand on those games. I’ll likely skip the games this coming weekend and read a good book. We’ll see what we end up with whether I actually watch the SuperBowl…

I think all the galleries are updated correctly now and the gallery pages are back. The audio files now work as well.

I’m still working on getting all the old comments back in place and then I think the site repairs will all be done. Whew…

Just love all this work. Stupid hacks…

Well, the site is mostly back to normal now. I still have some image gallery issues I’m working through because they are numbered differently than they were the last time due to me not re-creating the Invader Zim galleries. In some ways, I’m kind of glad that this happened because it forced me to update my WordPress sites to the latest software. As Cory had commented a few posts before, this is a pretty nice new version (2.7) and now that they’ve got the auto update feature in place, I should be able to keep up without fretting that I’m going to break the site every time they release an update.