Its official, we have spent a good chunk of our cruise refund. We have a reservation at the Mountain Green Resort in Killington, VT from January 26th through the 29th with two day lift tickets included. My friends Aaron and Tracey will be joining us in the room. Another group is working on reserving an additional room for the same time, hopefully that works out.

We booked our flights last night, so pretty much everything is taken care of already. We fly into Manchester, NH where Aaron will pick us up on his way from Boston. We will then head right to Killington to start off the weekend. I cannot wait!

This trip will add two states to my list of visited states. Why don’t you count up your total number and post it in the comments section? Currently I’ve been to 30, after this trip it will be 32. Remember that airport layovers do NOT count but DC does.

As discussed in the comments of yesterday’s post, the bearcats blew it miserably last night. Fortunately I didn’t have to watch the blowout for a few reasons:

1. We only have basic cable, so we do not get ESPN2 (or anything above channel 13 really). We usually watch sporting events that we don’t get over at Mike’s place. Well Mike played softball last night as a substitute on Joel’s team.
2. We needed to help our kids out with their homework. They got their midterm grades and both of them are failing at least one class. We set goals for the end of the quarter, and if they can reach them then we said we would do something special with them. We’ll see how they progress. Personally I spent a couple of hours last night doing Math with Dominique.
3. We had the kids out way too late and by the time we got back I’m sure the game was almost over anyway. Instead we headed down to Cold Stone, which just opened on the plaza a week or two ago!

Leave it to Kansas City to ruin a marathon and potentially someone’s goals and/or dreams. Who thinks that they’ll actually have the race again next year? I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Maybe they should permanently give up.

Tonight is the battle for the Victory Bell between UC and Miami (Ohio). If you didn’t already know Mike is a Miami graduate and of course Kim and I both are UC graduates. Hopefully we’ll be able to watch a little of the game with him, while cracking open a few cold ones with the Bearcat bottle opener that sings the UC fight song!

Once again I was victorious in all three of my fantasy football leagues! I must have had a case of beginner’s un-luck, because I am now kicking everyone’s butt. The big showdown of this coming week is my game versus my brother. Both of our teams scored 163 points this past weekend and we are both 2-1 in the league currently. Projected stats for next week have me winning 125 to 114, should be a good game.

Last night we pretty much sat around and watched the Chiefs blow it. I was in bed shortly after the start of the second half, it definitely was not something to stay up and watch all night.

Katie and Bill got into KC at the same time that I got home from work. We hung around our place for a little bit and then went down to the plaza art fair for a couple of hours. We could not stay out too long though, since we had the race in the morning.

The race went really well, especially for only running once between the 10K and this one. Kim and I finished with a time of 23:29 (7:34 per mile) and Katie was just behind us with a time of 26:04. Kim actually finished in 16th place overall for women. I finished in 51st overall. Full results can be found here. After our run we watched some of the marathon runners pass close to our house. Some of them make it look so easy!

From there we went over to The ‘Falloon to watch the OSU/Iowa game. Of course the OSU fans were really outnumbered, but we quickly shut them all up! :) After the game was over we took the bus down to Oktoberfest. We’ve gone down before and didn’t really enjoy it that much, so I was hoping for a better time, but this wasn’t the case. I guess we are just spoiled because of Cincinnati’s crazy party. And to make it worse, we had to wait for like an hour to get a cab, we were not very happy about that at all.

Once we did get a cab we headed over to Kemper Arena for the NHL preseason game. We got to see the St. Louis Blues beat the Nashville Predators 2-1. It was nice to see NHL hockey again even though it was only preseason. There was a high school game afterward that Mike and I stayed to watch a little of. I’ll have to try and get to another one sometime soon. I’d also like to go to a big high school football game here, if there is such a thing.

Sunday Bill and Katie got an early start on the drive back to Cincinnati. Kim and I were pretty lazy up until noonish, when we had to pick up the kids and head out to the Royal’s game. I guess we picked the right game to go to because the Royal’s actually beat the Indians in a pretty exciting game. After the game was over we dropped the kids off and then did some typical Sunday afternoon errands. It was definitely a fun weekend, hopefully Bill and Katie can come back soon!

Last night we took “the kids” out for a couple of hours. We didn’t really do anything too exciting, but we have plans to get together with them again this weekend.

Also this weekend Kim’s cousin Katie and her boyfriend Bill are coming to visit. There is a plethora of things going on this weekend, including another race. This time we are only running a 5K, part of this weekends Kansas City Marathon. I’m sure I’ll have lots of stories from another crazy weekend.

If you are a reader who is local to Kansas City, then you probably also enjoyed 97.3 The Planet while it was around. There is now a website (actually just a message board) dedicated to bringing it back. Check it out and while you are there, sign the online petition to “Save The Planet.”

Last night I went and checked out Coldplay. I thought about going before, but the $20 lawn tickets sold me on going the day before the show. It was well worth it in my opinion. They put on quite a show, despite taking forever to take the stage after the opener (we’re talking a full hour between sets). Their lights and video board behind them were incredible! Chris Martin (not our BBQ friend) sounded great as did the rest of the band, but his voice really shined. They played pretty much every song I wanted to hear and I’d say that I knew 75% of the songs they played. It was a good night out at Verizon.

So what does everyone think of the new O.A.R. tune??

Nothing terribly exciting to add today. I was stuck actually doing work last night. I went over to my boss’ house so that we could update one of our clients together. We have to do this after normal hours so that everyone is off of the system. I am going to start doing some of these updates on my own, so Steve wanted me to do a couple of them with him first. I guess this is also a way to motivate me to figure out how we can use an installation script to do our updates for us or have the clients do it themselves. Honestly, who wants to do work at night from their home, I know I don’t. An install script is one of my projects to work on in my free time, now we just need to hire more people so I can actually work on my projects and not spend all of my time testing bug fixes.

O.A.R. is going to be on Leno tonight, be sure to tune in if you can. I’ll likely have a link to a downloadable version up on oarsa.org later tonight or very early tomorrow morning.

I went to the John Mayer Trio show last night with my friend Beth, who also gave me a free ticket to tape the show. Score! I hadn’t seen Mayer in over 3 years, I guess I stopped going to the shows soon after all the little girls started going. Anyway, the show last night was great. I think they played only two older Mayer songs, but everything else was brand new stuff that was all much bluesier. Of course this showcased Mayer’s guitar skills much more than his vocals. I loved it, although I’m still not sure I’d pay the hefty ticket price to see the show.

Ray LaMontagne opened the show, and I was so happy to finally get to see him. He played with only a guy on the upright bass. They played a pretty short 40 minute set, but it was nice. His voice is amazing!

I’ll be converting both tapes soon.

After professing my hate for fantasy football last week, I won all three games this week. To top that, none of them were against a team with no players set to play, they were all legit wins! My combined record is now 4-2, which isn’t so bad. Hopefully I can keep the winning streak alive.

We didn’t do much on Friday night. I made some pasta and we watched a little TV. That pretty much sums it up.

Saturday we got up at 6 to get ready for the race. We met up with Todd out in Kearney and sooner than later we were on the start line ready to run. There were only a hundred or so people total, and most were running the 5K. I know for a fact that there were only 26 people running the 10K. We started off pretty fast, the first mile took about eight minutes to finish. I think it was the downhill start or the fast 5K runners who caused this. Of course we slowed down and in the end we finished with a time of 52:20. I was really happy with this performance, especially since my goals were to finish and if possible to finish under an hour.

We attended the awards ceremony. Kim got first in her age bracket, the only female runner between the ages of 25 and 29. I got second in my bracket, aka last place for ages 25 through 29. Todd didn’t place, somehow the majority of runners were all around his age and fast. I think we were all happy that we finished though!

From there we watched a little bit of the parade with Doni and then headed out to the festival grounds to see what was cooking. The “Triple Fat Back” BBQ team were putting the finishing touches on their competition meat. We were there to help sample the leftovers. I had both the turkey and chicken that Todd cooked and they were both very tasty! I believe that Phil’s brisket won second third place, so it seems that these guys are ready for the real competition in a couple of weeks, the American Royal.

Kim and I left before the cooking was done because we had to get back to our place for a little party we were throwing. We had all of the regulars over along with my friends Steve Christy and Courtney. Joel and Amanda brought over most of the food, which Mike and I grilled up for everyone. From there most of us partied along the Falldo Waldo Crawldo (noisy site) route for a few hours. It was a great time and most of us even made it to all six bars.

Sunday was a lazy day for us. We were supposed to participate in the Walk to D’Feet ALS but someone had a “stomach bug” that prevented that from happening. Thanks to my parents though I was able to raise a little bit of money for the cause. The majority of the day we were on the couch watching TV, recovering from the run and party the day before.

One thing that really sucks happened over the weekend. My favorite local radio station, 97.3 The Planet changed formats and is now Max FM. Somehow The Planet had the lowest ratings in the city and I guess they were forced into this. I’m not sure what I’ll do in my car now, perhaps I should start looking into satellite radio.