Jamie's Journal

I figured out the true reason why I don't write here much anymore. I just got tired of writing about myself and my own life. Since I'm still fighting off the Facebook drumbeat, I'm only going with the big stuff here, like this:

My sister had her first kid, a girl, on January 22. After a couple of days in the hospital, they all went home with my mom in tow, who flew up to Maryland to give my sister a crash course in baby care. Almost immediately my brother-in-law swaddled the baby in Jets onesies and hats and booties and anything else he could find that had a Jets logo on it for the AFC championship. That poor kid didn't even have a chance.

Other than that, everyone is doing fine, and my mom even got to see it snow last Saturday. She said it was the first time she had seen it snow since the one time it ever snowed in Tampa. And it was the good fluffy kind, not the slushy kind that was still on the ground here Christmas morning as we carefully drove to the airport. (It sucked having to leave a white Christmas behind.)

Last year I came up with "holiday shoehorning," to describe the process of finding a shoddy reason to work your product into Christmas when it really has nothing to do with the holiday.

Here's how you can find this year's highlight.

1. Open iTunes.
2. Go to the iTunes Store.
3. Type in "Wonderful Christmastime."
4. Find the "workout remix" by the artist iSweat Fitness Music.
5. Listen to the 30 seconds of absolute CRAP that comes out of your speakers or headphones.

You can thank me later.

Dana confirmed he was actually looking for the second option in this AutoComplete list.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acheron0/4149322838/

I love how every time I read an article about poker player Tom Dwan on Card Player's Web site, the author is extremely careful to use exactly four R's in his nickname, Durrrr. However, it seems that the number of R's varies from site to site. This is something I think we need to get the AP Stylebook people to settle. Or at the very least, the Fake AP Stylebook people.

I let my paid journal lapse. I'm not sure what I want to do with this going forward, because I can't really talk about work (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is I don't want to torpedo my career if something happens that I don't like) but it takes up an increasing amount of my time. And other than that, I don't really have any stunning insights or thoughts to share right now.

The thing that really struck me was when I responded to a comment recently and started with the phrase, "If I thought anyone would care." Since the guiding principles of this have always been "no drama" and "I will try not to suck," there's no point in writing much right now.

People my wife has compared me to in the last couple of weeks, during which the weather has been dark and surly and so have I:

1. Larry David's character in "Curb Your Enthusiasm." She has compared herself to him, too. We are becoming even more antisocial than before, which did not seem possible. It's being done in a strangely charming way, and it's fun for us but probably not for anyone else.

2. Mr. Wilson from "Dennis the Menace." I'll let her explain that one.

(Original post.)

GLASS HALF FULL REASONING
Raheem Morris is the kind of guy a team would be OK with hiring a year too early just so they can get him coaching on their team. Next year's schedule is brutal on paper and the team needs more work than its record would indicate. Gruden probably would not have survived next season so it's better to clear him out now so players won't have to wonder what they're signing up for when the Bucs use their oodles of cap space in March. Plus they give Morris time to grow into the job. This move allows them to keep the next great NFL head coach, then retool and quickly get back into contention.

GLASS HALF EMPTY REASONING
The Glazer family is drowning in red ink after buying Manchester United and they can't afford to spend up to the cap. Getting rid of Gruden, who will find a new job very quickly, saves them money on coaches and lets them use the rebuilding/young coach excuse with the fans for awhile. In fact, they may have even fired him and the general manager because they wanted to spend the oodles of cap space and the Glazers refused, so they threw a fit. The team is a shambles and will suck now and in the foreseeable future, which is a perfectly just dessert for all the goobers who never accepted Gruden in the first place.

I only wrote three or four serious entries during September because I don't really have the energy to come up with anything interesting when I get home from work. Maybe I'm just getting naturally tired, or my body is telling me it doesn't like the hours I'm keeping. (There's really no point in me showing up to work early in the morning unless I have to attend a meeting. I could get there at 8:00am or at noon and I'd still wrap up around the same time every day. So I stay up later and wake up later and do a fair amount of work at home.)

Or I could just be burned out. In my job, we don't really get holidays off. We're basically like a newspaper - we can't skip a weekday just because it's a holiday and everyone else has the day off. The only time I'm truly not working is when I take a vacation. Unfortunately, I lost all my vacation tenure during my "summer vacation" a couple years ago, so I have a piddly amount of vacation to work with this year. The only "vacation" I've taken since last Thanksgiving was for my birthday. This has proven to be a horrible idea. I still like my job, but I don't like doing it for basically eleven months in a row.

I'm really trying to hang on until our trip to Washington at the end of this month. We're going up there to visit my sister and brother-in-law. Cristina's never been there, and except for a short trip for my sister's college graduation and going up there to get her stuff a couple times at the end of semesters, I haven't been there in over a decade. (For me, the upshot is that it will be the first time I get to tour the city as an adult. All the other trips were to visit my grandmother before she moved to St. Augustine.) That's like the finish line off in the distance as I huff and puff my way past the Mile 25 mark. If I make it, I get four days without having to think about work at all. I can do this.

Good thing I didn't go to the Rays debacle in Arlington tonight (the Rangers had a nice 11-run rally with two outs in the 5th inning) and kept my calendar clear for this one.

And now the top five quotes from various sources about the game:

5. "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" - me in a text to Dana right after the game

4. "I think I need a shower after that." - an unnamed USF fan at our watch party when it was all over

3. The Bobby Bowden sampler platter from his postgame presser:

- "They whupped us. They're a lot better than I thought."
- "(Daniels) killed us. Boy, they've got a great one there."
- "The way we got beat up on offense, I didn’t know we could get beat up like that. They did everything faster than I thought."
- "I knew they were good, but ... they beat the heck out of us."

2. RT @edsbs: So much depends/on a red wheelbarrow/named South Florida/beating the shit out of Florida State

1. "We took a knee in their stadium, fucking A." - my follow-up to Dana, who didn't know what had happened

I'm going to try not to write this like a eulogy. I will probably fail.

Saturday night I was in football multitask mode, watching three or four games at once on TV while I had the USF game streaming on my computer from some bootleg site. (Sorry USF, I didn't spend the $10, although the reviews of Bulls Vision tell me it was a wise non-investment.) Things seemed in hand, we were pounding some outmatched team, and then came the three worst words in the history of USF football: "Grothe is down."

It's a torn ACL. His season and Bulls career are over.

The rest of the game had a pall cast over it - within minutes, the sideline reporter on the Bulls Radio Network was saying how bummed out and distracted everyone was on the sideline. There's no question if this had happened during an even slightly important game, the team would have gone into a tailspin and blown the game.

We've never had what you could consider a catastrophic injury. Sure, key players have been hurt and missed games, but not the face of the program. Anyone outside of Tampa Bay who knew anything about USF football knew about it because of Matt Grothe. He was the guy they saw on SportsCenter weaving around in the backfield, and then throwing a ridonkulous* touchdown pass or tucking and running for a first down. The guy had a mediocre arm, average speed, questionable defense-reading skills, and he took some crazy chances that sometimes blew up in his face. He had a crazy mohawk and liked deer hunting and ate too much Chick-Fil-A**. But when he was at his best, no one had an answer for him.







OK, he never won anything really, really important, like a conference title or a big bowl game. But he's a folk hero to us - the guy who totally maxed out his abilities, gave us a bunch of thrills, and left us in a better place. He will always be remembered fondly by USF fans.

And there's a silver lining to all this - the B.J. Daniels era begins right now. Everyone is excited because Daniels looks like the step up from Grothe that everyone knew Grothe would be when he took over at QB as a redshirt freshman, like Daniels is now. Daniels is faster than Grothe and even more elusive, plus he has a laser rocket arm***. Sure we wish Grothe hadn't blown out his knee, but this could be a blessing in disguise. As long as we don't kick dirt on Matt's face and forget what he did. Without him, there aren't 65,000 people at our games, there aren't national rankings, there aren't three games a year on ESPN, and ironically, there's no B.J. Daniels on the team because they never could have gotten that caliber of player to sign with them.

Bring on the 'Noles.

* - Like Jon Gruden.
** - Like me.
** - Like Peyton Manning, AKA "The Sheriff."