CommonException[dot]com

We lost our chance to defend our championship title by bowling one of our worst nights of the season. Woohoo. Bring on the tournament play.

Session Average: 206
First Ball Average: 9.1
Open Frames: 5 (average 2 per game)
Spares: 9
Strikes: 17
Splits: 2 (1 converted)

Games: 195  211  214
Series: 620

Oh yeah…we won the championship. Thanks to Chris, Ken, Eric, Nolan, Joe, Chad, Jesse, and Matt for a great league season.

Update: Apparently my name was in the paper. They got my score wrong (625) which tied for tenth best series in our league for the night.

Despite having the lowest averages and the worst record in the league, we’re headed to the finals! We all had at least two games well above average and banged out a victory in the first two games. We won the second by 185 pins!

The other team in the finals had an incredible third game tonight - three of their guys were over 240. Still, if we had played them tonight, we would have taken the first two games and the championship. I was a little nervous to start things off tonight, let’s hope I can relax next week. I’m looking forward to it.

Week one of the playoffs. We arrive to find that we’ve been matched up with the number one seed (the team from the bowling alley). We’re number eight of eight; but it didn’t matter.

We knocked off the number one seed!!

I honestly don’t even know what my scores were, I just know we held on to win the last game by five pins. It didn’t matter that Chris was robbed of nine pins by a technicality in the second game and we went on to lose that game by six. It didn’t matter that Eric was well below average all night. It didn’t matter that their third man had a 252 in the third. It didn’t matter that their anchor finished with six strikes in a row. It didn’t matter that we had an annoying audience for the last five frames.

All that mattered was Nolan’s finish: X X X 9.

Sweet.

Chris and I headed over to Wildcat Lanes tonight for Buck Night. We were both bowling way better than we have in the past few weeks. It would have been more fun with more people, but I can’t complain too muich. We both bowled well above our league averages, and I set a new high game of 223 with a series of 551! I still can’t believe more people don’t show up on Saturdays.

It’s a pretty busy time, but it’s one I really enjoy. My parents along with my sister and her boyfriend (who I finally got to meet) were up for Thanksgiving. We sort of hosted, and I think we did pretty well with it. I gave them a (limited) tour of Madison through the snow and slick streets. We also went bowling and saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The movie was pretty good, but there is no way Dumbledore would ever grab a student like that. I think Michael Gambon really missed the target with his portrayal of the headmaster this time around. A few other changes for the movie were mildly annoying, but overall it was really good. It was also nice to talk to my family for more than 30 minutes on the phone.

My bowling team has been doing pretty well lately. After the first seven or eight weeks, they reset the standings and since then we’re right around .500. My average is still going up (six pins in the last two weeks) and we’re third in our division. Bowling in the league is fun, but I think it’s a little too competitive for my taste, at least with my current performance where it is. I’ll probably try to get into a mixed league next summer.

So after losing every single coach’s challenge for the entire season, the Chiefs finally won not one but two today, one overturning a crucial play that helped them beat the Broncos. My three Chiefs fantasy players all did pretty well too which was nice, even if the rest of my players were lousy today. Oh, and the Bears handed Green Bay one of their bigger losses of the season. I am highly amused with the Packer’s total suckage this season, especially since I’m now surrounded by fans of The Pack.

I’m about 1/3 done with my Christmas and birthday shopping (both my mom and sister have birthdays within a week of Christmas). I’m hoping to have the rest done by the end of the week. I just have to figure out how to keep Amber’s hidden away until I can wrap them. This apartment isn’t that big. It is big enough, however, for a 6 foot Christmas tree. We went and got ours yesterday at a tree farm north of Madison. The place was OK, but I’ve been totally spoiled by Prairie Pines. It took quite a while but we eventually got it inside and decorated. It’s twinkling away as I speak (although it was an adventure finding some lights that did what we wanted).

I really think Amber and I could get into GeoCaching. It’s something I heard about on TWiT while I was listening at work this week. It sounds like lots of fun. I need to do some research on GPS units…

Edit: Here’s our tree. Happy Holidays!

It seems like the weekends fly by. It doesn’t help that I connected to work for a few hours today so I could get a little extra time in. I tried to distract myself with football, but watching the Chiefs soon started to piss me off and I turned it off. I think everything that could go wrong, did go wrong for my fantasy team. The game was a battle for the bottom and I have a feeling I lost (or won, depending on how you look at it). I’ll find out tomorrow because I’m too cheap to pay for Yahoo’s stat tracker for live results.

We did get one major thing accomplished this weeked. We went to the JC Penney portrait studio for some engagement photos. We ended up waiting almost an hour beyond the time of our appointment, but they did acknowledge that fact by giving us two free sheets of pictures. I’m hoping to add a page soon with some details on the engagement and wedding, so look for that soon. I think Amber has already created something, but I don’t remember where it’s at.

I just finished watching Family Guy a little bit ago. It was one of the funniest episodes in a long time. The jokes were a nice mix of classic throwbacks to earlier episodes and excellent random bits that make the show so funny. Recently I’ve thought a few of the gags were a bit overused (think drawing out last weeks Osama scene while he rambles for no apparent reason), but tonights was spot on. The ending wasn’t the best, but still an excellent episode. It’s still some of the funniest stuff on TV.

Seth MacFarlane’s other show, American Dad, has been pretty good lately, too. It’s a different kind of humor, but with a similar style. It’s a nice followup for the Griffin family. We need to see more of the fish.

So I’m working on categorizing old posts while I watch the Chiefs game. The Raiders had just come back to take the lead late in the 4th quarter. They’re kicking off to Dante Hall with 1:45 left in the game, and suddenly CBS cuts to the beginning of the damn Packers’ game already in progress! With that little time left in a close game would it really have killed them to let me see if the Chiefs could pull out the win? No, I didn’t think so.

Update: The Chiefs drove down the field and Larry Johnson scored a touchdown from one yard out before time expired.

I’ve liked baseball as much as any sport since I was a little kid, but tonight’s end to the World Series makes me sad. Two years in a row it’s been a sweep, and that’s just boring. Tonight’s game was decided by a single run scored in the 8th inning. I don’t really care that the White Sox won or that the Astros lost (although I would have preferred the opposite). What bothers me is that in the end it wasn’t very exciting, despite all of the controversial calls on the way to the series.

That’s another thing that bugs me. Bad calls (questionable at least) seemed to be the bane of the post season this year, and I hate to see that when they directly affect the outcome of such important games. So many people think replay in baseball would be the worst thing ever, but sometimes I think it would be appropriate in some situations. As a baseball fan, I guess I’m just disappointed in how things wrapped up.

You know the yellow first down line they project on the field when a football game is on TV? I’ve always had an idea how it works, but I didn’t realize it was this complicated.

read more | digg story