If you weren’t already aware, the NFL announced the 2006 schedule about a month ago. If you click on that link, you should notice right near the top of the page a very important game, Cincinnati at Kansas City on September 10th. That’s right, as if we didn’t have enough fun entertaining over twenty family members and friends along with watching the same teams play in KC to start off ’06, we get a chance to do it all over again!

Kim has already been in contact with the group ticket office and it looks like we’ll be able to get tickets once again, as long as we have over 20 total people. We were told that we would get another email in about two weeks with an order form attached. So if you’d like to join us for an unforgettable weekend in KC let us know ASAP. We’ve already sent out an email to most of the people who came last year and included any others we thought might be interested. Let me know if you are interested…

WHO DEY!

One week and counting until we close on our new home and our neighborhood just got even better. Eddie Delahunt, a local Irish musician, has announced he is opening a cafe at 45th and State Line in the antique district. This is literally less than a block from our house. The site was formerly home to Balsano’s, which just closed a few months ago. When we put our offer in on the house we were saddened when we realized that this shop was closed, but now I’m happy that Eddie Delahunt’s “Cafe &” will be opened in its place. I’m even more excited to learn that the cafe will also have live music!

According to Irish KC and the Irish Fest Blog, Eddie says “Cafe &” will be open before June 1st.

The Trolley Run results are in and Kim was the fastest out of everyone I know. She finished with a time of 28:50, or 7:13 per mile. This puts her in the top 100 women runners (98th place) which is great even though she was beat by a couple of 13 year olds! Right behind her were Todd and Christie, with times of 30:19 and 30:44 respectively. Christie was running in her first race and did a heck of a job! I know I’ve never run the trolley run that fast, and to prove that here are the results from the past two years:

I guess it’s pretty safe to say that I’ve been holding Kim back for years. Perhaps next year I’ll run it once again and try to break the 30:00 mark as well. I think everyone improved their times this year, well besides Phil and Doni who decided to take a year off from training. Congrats to everyone who participated and finished!

I haven’t played that much hockey in years. Here’s a recap for those of you who didn’t make it out to the rink.

We easily won Friday’s game versus the defending champs from our regular league. I guess that means we should have been the champions in the last session. Thankfully it appears that another session is going to start this coming weekend, so we’ll have to win this time around. After the game Friday a few of the guys from the team hung around the “bar” for a couple hours to eat some wings and have a couple of drinks.

I had to wake up early on Saturday morning to play another game against a team we’ve never played before. This team plays down south at the Pepsi Center and thus had home ice advantage over us. The game was really fast and mostly clean, making it one of the more fun games we’ve played in awhile. The end result was a tie and since the tournament was a round-robin style it ended that way. Phil and Todd made it out for the last five minutes of the game, just in time to watch us give up our two goal lead. This is totally unrelated but go check out the new design on Phil’s site! :)

Since we had another game later in the day our team decided to hang out at the 810 Zone for awhile in between games. We ate some food and watched the first few picks of the NFL draft. I’d recommend checking this place out for yourself if you are ever down in Overland Park.

Later that afternoon it was time for our second game of the day. We knew going into the game that if we won we would be in the championship game. Our opponent for this game was another that we had never played, a team from Omaha. You could tell that we were feeling the effects from our first two games, but we went on to win this game rather easily and moved right into the championship game.

Our opponent in the championship game would be determined right after our game when the team we played in our first game faced off against another team from our league. The second team was not themselves though. We quickly realized that they had added some ringers to their roster and thus they beat the team we had also beaten the day before. Knowing now who our enemies would be, we headed off to Johnny’s Tavern for a tournament sponsored party. We had a good time for a couple of hours and then decided to head home to rest up for the championship.

My Sunday morning wake up call came even earlier than the day before. Kim was participating in the Trolley Run along with her mom and a couple of her aunts. I dropped them all off at the starting line and then drove down to the plaza area to watch the finish. Kim ran the four miles easily and finished with a great time somewhere around the 28 minute mark. We’ll know for sure once the results are posted on the website. After everyone was finished running or walking we quickly got our things together and drove out to the rink for my game.

Since Kim was busy entertaining our guests most of the weekend, this was the first game she attended of the tournament. She could have picked a better one to watch, but at least she got to see me score a goal. We ended up losing the tough game 2-1. We stopped all of their ringers from scoring any goals, but in the process we never played enough offense to win the game. A second place finish is still worth the pain that I’m feeling today, and our team had a great time playing in the tournament. Hopefully there will be another one in the future.

Not since the Outlaws left Kansas City, less than one year after forming, has there been a hockey game of the caliber you could see this weekend. Well there was that one “NHL Rules” game a month ago, but luckily the action this weekend is completely free. The weekend for the 2006 Midwest Adult Classic is finally here and my team, the Moose, are hoping to win it all! If you want to find me this weekend, there is a good chance that I’ll be at the Pepsi Center, 135th and Quivira.

• Tonight: 6PM
• Tomorrow morning: 9:30AM
• Tomorrow evening: 5PM
• Sunday morning: 11:30AM (hopefully)

I’ll see you there. If you are still in need of a little encouragement, there’s a bar at the rink!

I added some pictures to the site from our weed picking event at the nature center along with a few from the Royals game later that night. That’s about the most productive thing I did last night. I was hit with a little “stomach bug” about halfway through my work day and I never really recovered. I’m still feeling a little bit off today, but hopefully that will change soon.

While navigating through a newly opened route in the Triangle this morning an Elton John song came on my Sirius radio. After that song was over my “artist alert” immediately indicated that a different Elton John song was on another station. I tuned into that one as well and it finished up just as I was pulling into work.

What’s my point? Well I also have Billy Joel saved into my radio and I receive an alert every time one of his songs is on any channel. Typically I get more alerts for Billy Joel than I do for Elton John, at least at the times when I’m in the car. Does Sirius favor Billy Joel over Sir Elton or is it just coincidence? This led me to a little debate with myself over whom I thought was better. I know that Kim would obviously say Billy Joel, since he’s her favorite performer of all time. Although I enjoy various songs from each of them, I give a slight advantage to Billy Joel. It seems that he has created more songs that I enjoy than Elton John has. Regardless I’d love to see either one (preferably both) of them live someday.

Last night we made the scenic drive out to Shawnee, Kansas to our friends Joel and Amanda’s house. As I mentioned earlier Amanda’s birthday was over the weekend, and the girls had planned to get together this week for a “girls night.” I guess the crappy weather from the past couple of days spoiled their plans and they decided they were just going to hang out at their house. Well Joel found out about it and invited me over as well.

Anyway, Joel cooked up some food on the grill while we ate appetizers and had a few Corona’s. After stuffing ourselves we watched last night’s episode of American Idol. I don’t mention it very often but I haven’t missed a week of this show in quite some time. Imagine that, a live music freak such as myself watching a pop music competition. My one saving grace is that I don’t vote, I never have, and I never plan on doing so. I’m a sucker for entertaining television I guess, and besides how can you go wrong watching a crazy Paula Abdul.

The show’s theme was love songs but I think very few people actually loved the contestants’ performances, well besides Paula who was in tears at one point. A couple of the male performances were probably the best of the night but how could you not be a huge fan of Katharine McPhee, especially when her performance includes a wardrobe malfunction. Now that’s what Ed calls TV!

We had a meeting this morning with an HR representative from our new parent company. I should have known that this meeting wasn’t going to be beneficial once I found out the representative is a graduate from Xavier (GO CATS). I was hoping to have the answers to all of my questions like how many vacation days do we get? What will my new salary be? What about holidays? Etc. Instead we got a generic overview of how the company works and what benefits they offer versus what we currently have. Basically everything that was said was pretty much a given.

Officially the acquisition is not final and won’t be for another week or two. At that point we will get some brochures and paperwork to fill out, but from the sounds of it still will not know how it truly affects us. It will not be until shortly before we merge into their benefits system that we will understand how things will be changing. At the earliest this is scheduled to happen on July 1st. Until then I guess nothing will be changing here at the office, which is both good and bad.

I’m happy with the way things currently are/were here but as I mentioned earlier I’m excited to see how certain things can be better when working for a much larger company. At the same time things could be terrible after we merge into their system and therefore I should be thankful that I get a few more months of things they way they currently are. I think I just gave myself a headache…

Kim and I had dinner and a couple drinks at Jazz after work on Friday. I was still a little stuffed from lunch, so I just ordered some fried pickles. Kim ordered her favorite dish, the chicken cacciatore. Since the servings are fairly large I was able to eat a little of her food in addition to the pickles. We even had some left over cacciatore to take home with us. Later in the night Doni and Phil came over to play some cards. Euchre was the name of the game and the guy team had no problem claiming victory!

Saturday started much earlier than a typical weekend morning. Earlier in the week Kim had volunteered our services to the Lakeside Nature Center for a couple of hours. Big Brothers/Sisters was having an Earth Day event there so we took Bianca and her younger twin sisters along to help out. We were put on weed picking duty around a little pond since we had little kids with us and probably shouldn’t be using any dangerous tools. I worked hard for two hours while Kim took the twins on a nature hike.

After stirring up my allergies at the nature center we dropped the kids off and headed back to Loose Park to play some golf. We got stuck playing behind a guy and his son, who was at most four years old. Perhaps this helped us relax though because we both played some of the best golf that we’ve ever played. I’m finally starting to hit the ball pretty consistently and my putting was much better than it has been recently.

As if that wasn’t enough time spent outside in one day, we then met up with some friends and headed out to the Royals game. Before Saturdays game the Royals were on an eleven game losing streak including a loss the night before to Cleveland. We must have brought some good luck with us even though Mike was wearing his Indian’s shirt. The Royals actually won again last night and are on a two game winning streak!

After the game everyone came back to our place to play euchre and to celebrate our friend Amanda’s birthday.

Yesterday was a very lazy day. After going to Planet Sub for lunch and enjoying $2 turkey subs, I didn’t leave the apartment for a couple of hours. When I did leave it was only to hit some balls at the driving range and then a quick trip through the grocery store. All of that laying around made it hard to fall asleep last night which has led to a sleepy Monday morning. I’m hoping the coffee will carry through the rest of the day.

Things have started to slow down again, at least back to a somewhat manageable pace. Here’s a list of things that I’ve been doing recently along with some random finds:

• “My son and his girlfriend live in Kansas City. A group of 30 family and friends went out for the game on New Year’s Day. Here is one of the many shots that were taken. The whole city knows the ‘Bengals Growl’ because we sang it where ever we went! Who-Dey!” Check it out, our story is on bengals.com (second one down).
• UMRSigEp.com is now live, although I’m still waiting on content in a few places. As a reminder, I’m always looking for new and exciting website projects! Perhaps I’ll even release edpaffjr.com v2 sometime soon.
• A link to my blog has been spotted on the finance.google.com page for Harris. At least one of my fellow coworkers has already found my site. I guess I better watch what I write. :)
• TrustEdDesigns.com now points to this website. In the future I’m hoping to put up a separate page for all of my web design stuff. For now, welcome to TrustEd Designs!