I can see my house from here.

What is it about the "underdog" that intrigues me so?  Why am I so prone to rooting for the player or the team that no one really expects to win?  It's a classic scenario and pretty much a gauranteed movie hit if you write it up for a screenplay.  Maybe it's the fact that I'm tall...for a first grader.   On one level or another, I think I've been an underdog in most competitive situations I've found myself in.  Maybe it's being the product of an off and on Mountain West school...the fans of the Univ. of Wyoming are a special breed and deserve a write up all their own!   Maybe it's ingrained as a result of being born in Minnesota and rooting for the Twins and Vikings with only 2 World Series titles to boast in a quarter century of knowing what I was actually cheering for.   I love movies like Rudy, The Replacements, Field of Dreams...shoot, even Lord of the Rings was an underdog story.  They are stories of people who persevered, who endured and, i

The old saying goes something like, "What do guests and fish have in common?  They both stink after three days!"  Well, we just wrapped up a week up north with family...as the guests, and I'm sure they're relieved to have their homes back.  I don't think we particularly stunk, although Karsten did have a few near record diapers that I still don't understand.  How could something so cute produce something so noxious?  You shouldn't  leave a changing station feeling like you cut onions for an hour then used pepper spray for eye drops.  Nevertheless, we are home again in Denver having been thoroughly spoiled with gifts, and enjoying that we are close enough to visit family on a fairly regular basis.   What remains to be seen is if they keep letting us crash or if we start to receive text messages containing local hotel information...I expect they'll put up with us as long as we bring Karsten :)  A Merry Christmas season to all, a Happy New Year too!!

Indigestion n~ Technical name: dyspepsia ;   difficulty in digesting food, accompanied by abdominal pain, heartburn, and belching. I remember when I could eat anything I wanted and just about as much as I could fit on a mounded, heaping plate.  No more.  If I don't cut myself off from eating by 7pm I don't sleep, at least not well and probably at an upright angle.  I can't quite place the time or age when it all started, it just snuck up on me gradually and got to this point.  Sometimes it's the best reminder I have that I'm not 19 anymore.  Aging is weird like that, it's sneaky.  There are days you wake up and feel like you could run a 10k, then there are the days you wake feeling like you actually did.  It's a cruelty of life I guess to have to accept you are no longer the youngin' you use to be, that maybe you don't have the flexibility (in your back or your options) you once did.  What do we have to counter those sad little facts?

Sitting in church last Sunday, the pastor was telling the story about Mary and Joseph and relating what they went through to why more people wash their hands in public restrooms when someone else is there too.    Impressions; what you think other people think about you alters the behavior you might of otherwise practiced had no one else been present.   Like in this case, I might not write so freely if I thought someone might actually read this blog.   Self-effacement is endearing, maybe I'll get readers that way...but I digress. The pastor went on...Joseph was actually looking to dump Mary, quietly, so he wouldn't have to deal with all the rumors and whispering about Mary having someone else's baby...impressions.     We all know how the story ends of course, and he went on to wrap up the message by pushing us to worry less about what the world thinks..........but of course, I missed most of that because I was constantly waiting for the little LED sign to go off in the fr