Gym Stat

33 minutes on the eliptical this afternoon and down to 246.

Quinn is STRONG.

Wrapping up the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, and all the buzz around Brady Quinn has been negative. How the media does lash back. And so Quinn, to hear the pundits tell it, is dropping in the draft.. Kiper thinks he should be happy if he goes at 9.

If anyone doubts his competitiveness or just raw strength, though, they should pay heed to his performance on the bench-press on Sunday (from Eric Hansen's article in today's SBT):

He vowed he would leave the physical testing for later, but then Brady Quinn's
competitive juices got the best of him Sunday.

The former Notre Dame quarterback, who has yet to throw for pro scouts, gave them a little bit to chew on at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, ripping off 24 reps at 225 pounds in the bench press.

That's better than more than half the linebackers at the combine,
better than nine of the defensive linemen who lifted, better than top tight end
prospect Greg Olsen of Miami (originally in Quinn's recruiting class at ND),
better than offensive line teammates Ryan Harris (22) and Dan Santucci (23) and
just four fewer than Wisconsin offensive lineman Joe Thomas, the workout darling
of the combine to date.

Sweet-less, Day 7

I'm a little surprised, honestly. I never thought of myself as being one of those guys who ate a lot of sweets. But I'm finding-- and perhaps this is just a case of absence making the heart grow fonder-- that I'm really craving them. Or perhaps it's just that box of left-over Valentine's candy on top of the refrigerator being in plain view whenever I go to get the Gatorade and cheese for the boys.

Heading to the gym today, so we'll see where I weigh in. I was around 248-250 about a week or so. I'll be interested to see what happens over these next 6 weeks.

Sweet-less Lent, Day 3

Still hanging tough. Had a near miss with some m&m's lurking in a bag of trail mix at the office this afternoon, but managed to avert disaster on that one.

Ash Wednesday

Lent, Day 1 with no sweets. Not 10 minutes after getting back to the office from Mass, a co-worker offered me a Girl Scout Cookie. Oh, this is going to be much harder than I expected.

Memo to the Girl Scouts-- either deliver the cookies in January, or push back the shipment to sometime in late April. Every year, the cookies arrive right at the start of Lent. What's up with that?

Freakin' brilliant!

Every now and then, you come across something so simple, yet so smart..



courtesy of Lifehacker

Updates, Updates, Updates!

A few Sleepydad updates, since I haven't done any in a while, and some random notes:

First-- Snow Day! We got about an inch and a half of snow here at the house on Friday and both boys' schools were called off for the day, so we all stayed home and made a snowman out in the front yard. Here's a link to a slideshow of some pictures we took during the day.

Second, mine is the house of Pestilence! My wife and the boys have all been fighting one kind of bug or another for a week now. Aidan spiked a 103 degree fever on Sunday night, stayed home from school Monday and Tuesday, then Bryce started coming down with symptoms. Took them both to the doctor on Monday and they've both got raging ear infections... so it's a round of Amoxicillin for everyone! Now today, Aidan was sent home early from school-- the fever has returned. So it'll be back on the phone with the Ped tomorrow to see what they think the next step should be-- "Boys, remember not to leave the house without your surgical masks!"

Next, the Cold! It's been FREAKIN' cold here the last week or so. And given that I grew up far north of here, that's going some for me to say that. The thermometer may read 25 degrees, but I'm not always sure it's even that warm!

Yesterday was National Signing Day for College Football programs. The Irish got 18 signed commitments-- a great class, by any measure. But as always, it's always about the ones that got away: Aurelious Benn, Chris Little (the guy who's Mama told him to commit to ND after he verballed to FSU a few weeks ago-- the had a "conversion by the fax machine light" yesterday morning and decided to send his letter to Georgia), Greg Little... 11th hour de-commits. So Charlie's points of emphasis for next year's recruiting effort (which began this morning at 6am)-- focus on the meaning of the word 'Commitment'. In his press conference yesterday, he said "If they're looking, we're looking."

For any parents of young kids out there who might be reading this (heellllloooo?)-- found a pretty cool little website a week or so ago called Parentography.com. It only launched a couple of weeks ago, so it's low on content at the moment-- but the idea driving the site is one of those excellent "why the hell didn't I think of that" kind of ideas-- an online community/social networking site for parents to write reviews of local places that are good for their kids-- caregivers, schools, playgrounds, restaurants, the works. Users can also wrap those places up into 'excursions'-- linking different places into little sequences, as suggestions to other users for things like day-trips, etc. And they've got (right now) Yahoo maps running through an API displaying the lay of the land for all of the places on a map. I just think it's a great idea. But it's just in the offing now-- definitely at the 'get out of it only what you put into it' stage... but as more users sign on and start contributing content (hello-- I'm talking to you again, you parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, friends, etc etc), I think it could become a really useful online tool for parents... plus it's just kind of fun to blog, in a way, through reviews about places to take the kiddos.

Next: TV. Ah yes, the guilty pleasure. It's the dead of winter, so it's a good time for TV.. and I'm definitely keeping my TIVO warmed up. Guilty pleasures of the moment include
24-- but of course! A few weeks ago, Islamic groups were protesting the content of the recently started season, arguing that the show was confirming all kinds of negative stereotypes about Muslims-- your basic Italian-American argument against the Sopranos. Haha, well, I wonder if we'll be hearing from those folks anymore now that the last two weeks' episodes have revealed (yet again!) that the real villains of the story are just rich white guys from Orange County-- members of Jack Bauer's family, in fact! As Fox rebutted in a statement a few weeks ago, we should not forget that

Over the past several seasons, the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States...

to say nothing of "Day 2" when the blonde cutie from SoCal turned out to be the bad guy.

Other guilty TV pleasures include Battlestar Galactica (a decent 3rd season so far, but a bit plodding and ponderous), Boston Legal (also a bit of a meandering season, but still appointment television) and a new one-- The Unit. I've been lacking, it turns out, my quotient of spy-thriller recently and so far, of the two episodes I've seen so far, The Unit just might fit the bill for that. I'm going to slowly start working my way through Season One, hopefully this weekend.

And lastly-- Pooh! we have a reluctant guest in our midst-- a little kitty named Pooh. Brought here by my brother-in-law, Ross, Pooh's staying with us temporarily while Ross relocates to Austin. So far, Pooh and our 13-year old cranky tabby, Sylvie have NOT been getting along.. but in recent days, the war seems to have gone from hot to Cold... as in, cats issuing long, declaritive stares across great expanses of the house, with the occasional hissing and spitting... but no hairy furball fights of late. So we're taking it one day at a time.