Greatest Sunday EVER

Ever since the begining of this NFL season, I've had an ongoing bet with Brotha James. The bet being, my Chicago Bears would finish the season with a better record than his sorry Dallas Cowgirls. At first, it was looking like I was in trouble. My bears fell to 1-3 while the cowgirls jumped out to 2-2. Then they went up to 4-2. Luckily da Bears were able to get another win, giving them a 2-3 record. Then, this past Sunday happend. Dallas suffered one of the most embarassing losses an NFL team could have had happen. With the game tied at 10-10 against Seatle, 10 seconds on the clock, Dallas throws an interception which is run back to the 35 yard line. Seatle comes on the field and kicks a 50 yard feild goal to win it. At the same time up in Chicago, my Bears solid defense held the Ravens to only 2 field goals and beat them 10-6! Now, with a 3-3 record they are gaining ground on the 4-3 cowgirls. Dallas has a tough schedule ahead, with the Bronco's and Eagles to play. Chicago, has much better odd's with Detroit and happless Green Bay in its sights. Things are looking better!

One Very Cool Toy

Yesterday Apple announced the release of the new Video iPod. So, being the techie that I am, I looked up its specs to see if it was all its cracked up to be. I'll have to admit, this is one very cool device. Not only does it play music, show photo's and it will now hold up to 150 hours of video. Here's is where I figured there would be a catch, for sure. I thought surely they would screw it up by only allowing playback of copy protected, limited release, expensive video clips that I wouldnt really want to watch anyhow. I stand corrected. You can play .avi, .mov AND MPEG4 video. Meaning I can carry around homemade video clips and photos... or even (gasp) ripped DVD's from my home collection! Suddently this little device becomes the ultimate road trip, time killing, hand held entertainment device. The lowest priced model is the 30GB unit, which retails for $300. Thats a little steep but the price is much more justified with the features is packs. I'll be keeping my eye out for deals in the coming months on this little item. I may just have to break down and get one.

Check out the details here ---> Apple Video iPod

Late Entry

I almost forgot to post some of the pics I took in the Wichita Mountains. I let it slip from my previous post about the trip. There are alot of my friends EVP and Little EVP because he mentioned he didnt have a lot of pictures of just the two of them. So I figured I take a bunch so he could print them out. He was very happy with them
Check out the pictures! ---> Wichita Mountain Camping Trip

Pagers Suck

Its Friday morning and I've been "on-call" all week for work, carrying our pager because its my turn in the rotation. Normally the routine goes something like; the pager goes off in the evening and I call the person who paged, back and see if its something I can fix over the phone. If I can't, I notify the next person who can help them. But thats not what happened at 3AM this morning. That freakin pager goes off twice! Its beep tone is so loud, it startles me and I jump out of the bed like I was hit by an electric shock. I sit up confused, trying to figure out what that incredibly loud noise is and where its coming from. Finally, I grab the pager and press the little button to see what its beeping about. It simply says "servername - UP" UP?! UP?!! Its beeping just to notify me a server has come back online..... at 3AM!? On top of that, today is my early day at work so my alarm is set to go off at 6am. Sleep is more precious than gold at this moment. Needless to say, I wanted to smash that worthless little black box.

Back From the Wilderness

This past weekend was a true guys weekend. Myself, Brotha James, EVP and Little EVP (james), packed up gear... loaded it all into my Sportage and headed up to the Wichita Mountains in Southwest Oklahoma for a weekend of hiking, camping and exploring. This was EVP's first time up there, so I knew he and the kid would have a blast.

Our first stop was at the famous Meers Restaurant for one of their giant longhorn burgers, some onion rings and some cold drinks. Needless to say, we were all stuffed by the time we left. Figuring we needed some time to let things settle before starting out on our big hike for the day, we decided to make a stop at Mt. Scott. It was a fairly short stop. We took pictures of the vista's overlooking the mountain range. Great views on that hazy, cool morning!

From there we drove down the road to the Elk Mountain trail head. This is a hike ive done a few times before. Its only about 2.5 miles, round trip which I thought would be the perfect length since we had Little EVP with us who is only 7. Despite it being a shorter trail, it still had its challenging times of climbing as we navigated our way to the top. Finally we reached the summit and were rewarded with an incredible view of mountain tops patched together with tree filled valley's. There was a strong wind blowing across the top of the mountain, so we all just relaxed and let the breeze cool us down after the climb up there. While up there we hunted for the large lizards ive seen in the past, sunning themselves on rocks. But were unable to find any.

We hiked our way down and drove to the campgrounds. We arrived at Camp Doris to find it was a popular weekend for camping. All the prime spots had been taken, so we had to settle for one that was closer to other people camping that we had hoped. A cool thing happend as I was setting up my tent. Something moving out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked up and it was a deer just casually walking down the road near the campsite. Then a few minutes later, we saw a doe and a buck casually walking up from the nearby lake. Again, they were walking almost right thru our campsite very casually. I took out my camera, put the 300mm zoom lense and began snapping pictures of them. The buck began walking towards me and I was having to zoom out to fit him into the frame. He kept walking towards me and before I knew it, I had to walk backwards to get him in the frame because he was TOO close for that lense!! When I backed up, he saw me and stopped. He then looked around for the doe and trotted over to her quickly. It was a very cool thing to see them so close up. After we got the campfire going we cooked some chili-dogs and smores' for desert. Good stuff! The weather was perfect all night. Mid 60F degree temps made it easy sleeping weather. Although the ground was so hard I kept waking up to rotate my self in my sleeping bag. When I woke up for breakfast, my back and legs were a bit sore, but I stretched out and felt better. We cooked scrambled eggs & bacon for breakfast and had some banana's and apples to top things off. With our stomachs full, we packed up camp then headed out on a short hike to finish off the trip.

The ride home was pretty quiet. Everyone was exhausted. Little EVP lasted about 15 minutes into the ride. He was out like a light very quickly. The others drifted in and out of sleeping. I wanted a nap so bad, but I probably should stay awake since I was driving. We got home about 3:30pm and began the unpacking. It was a great trip and I hope to have the pictures up very soon on my site! Stay tuned!