Let’s pretend for a minute that you care about fantasy football. You don’t, of course, because most people feel the way about fantasy football that too-cool adolescents feel about Barbies and Pokemon cards, but humor me. I just went through one of the most painful disappointments of my life, and I need a little empathy here. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Memoirs’ Category
There were days when I couldn’t feel my legs. Or my arms, for that matter. Pretty much my whole body ached for three straight months, and it was all my fault. (more…)
I attended my fifth consecutive Chicago Bulls Media Day last week, and it never stops being awesome. For 364 days of the year, professional basketball players act completely burned out in terms of talking to the press, but on this one day they come in almost excited to talk about what their summer vacations and how good they think the team really can be this year.
See how happy he is?
It’s a perfect combination of these players having had a whole summer away from media and not having played a single game yet for us to break down and nitpick. We’re all coming back fresh, so there’s this blanket of optimism spread over the whole lot of us, making these Media Days one of the best work days for me all year.
I’m pretty calm and efficient at these things now. I know how to run around, get short interviews with just about everybody in a Bulls uniform, and then get back to my computer to start transcribing and giving my baby birds the informational feeding they crave.
Back in 2006, though, when I attended my first Media Day only a few months after joining the HOOPSWORLD team, there was nothing even resembling coolness or organization in my approach to the event. Keep in mind, this was the first NBA goings-on I had ever attended. Before this, I’d never really done any serious interviewing and I certainly had never come face to face with a professional athlete. I didn’t have butterflies in my stomach; I had gigantic mutant versions of those skull moths from “The Silence of the Lambs.” (more…)
It’s been ten years since I graduated high school, which means it’s been ten years since I put the finishing touches on my senior yearbook. You’d think that we, having graduated in the year 2000, would’ve been on the cutting edge of yearbook technology way back when, but we were not. Not really. (more…)
In just a couple of weeks, Wifey and I will be taking the Daughter to her first pumpkin patch, and this particular pumpkin patch is like the Rolls Royce of pumpkin patches.
Technically, it’s an apple orchard, but they also grow pumpkins and offer hayrides and a corn maze and huge playground and a petting zoo. There’s a rather large country shop on campus too that offers pretty much any pumpkin or apple-related product you can imagine, plus the usual autumnal goodies like roasted nuts and canned preserves. We’ve gone a couple years in a row with friends and have been very excited to take the baby this time around so she can celebrate her first fall in all the traditional ways.
Growing up, our equivalent pumpkin patch back home wasn’t anywhere near as classy as the one we’re planning on introducing to Baby. Subtract the corn maze, the orchard, and the country store, then add a reeeeeally cheesy haunted house, a Halloween novelty shop, and a few extra squash and gourds, and you’ve got Vana’s Pumpkin Land, the premier patchery of pumpkins in the greater Kankakee area. (more…)
