Equal Opportunity, You Know?

I'll admit it -- in all the championship excitement, I wasn't quite sure what to do with the color scheme on here. And then I forgot about it for a bit. So today is the day to take down the Phillies colors and replace them with the OU Crimson and Cream in celebration of their Big 12 Championship and upcoming National Championship game. It truly has been a great year!

But first, in fairness, I suppose I can't just gloss over the NFL season entirely. So here you go, it's one full month of Lions colors for each of their wins.

That Ain't Celcius, Kids

Tomorrow after church Laura and I are packing up the dog and going "home" for Christmas. We're from the same town and so we can go to one place and both sets of parents are there. There's no "this year we'll go to your family, and next to mine" or anything like that, and so that's nice. What's not so nice, though, is that they're all in South Dakota. There's basically no opportunity, nothing going on, and the high tomorrow is 4. (Yep, the HIGH. As in, if you go outside at just the right time, you can think to yourself, "Wow, I could NOT have picked a better moment all day long to be out in the weather. At least for today, this is truly as good as it gets!" And it will be 4.)

Sometimes I talk to friends or whatever who still live where they grew up, and their family and extended family and all of them are there, and I feel a little bit guilty that I left my hometown literally the day after I graduated from high school. Are my own personal preferences and ambitions more important than family? And it's not like my parents are terrible to be around, they're genuinely wonderful people.

You just don't ever have complete control over if your children will leave. What you DO have some control over, however, is where you give them the chance to stay. And if you want them to stick around, my strong recommendation is to not make it South Dakota.

This Post Is Not Mass-Produced In 800 Identical Locations

I see commercials or what not for restaurants that advertise this or that as "homemade." Am I wrong, or doesn't the very fact that you're getting something from a restaurant by definition mean that it is not homemade? Seriously, can anybody explain this to me and have it make sense?

Actually, Mack, Blame Me

In all the excitement I temporarily forgot about this, but in the interest of full disclosure I would like to use this forum to tell the world -- I'm the reason that OU is going to the Big 12 Championship Game over Texas and Texas Tech. No, I didn't hack into the computers to boost OU (their non-conference wins against TCU and Cincinnati did that). I didn't falsify votes in either of the pertinent polls. I didn't even text message voters reminding them of seemingly forgotten games, go on tv during major football games to argue for OU, or hire a plane to fly a banner bearing a point in OUr favor. It was far more subversive than any of those would have been.

Several weeks back, I was looking for a Christmas time outreach event for Life Pointe. The best event that I could find for a hand-out service type project was a thing called Bardstown Road Aglow on the evening of December 6th. I looked ahead a couple weeks on the college football schedule and my fears were confirmed -- that was the date of the Big 12 Championship game, and if I scheduled the event and OU was playing, I would have to miss (part, at least, of) the game. But there simply was no other remotely workable event that I could find. So I pulled the trigger on Bardstown Road Aglow. Knowing full well that surely the final improbable events would fall into place and that I -- the guy without tivo, by the way -- would take myself away from the epic dual.

So blame me, Mack Brown. Point your fingers, members of the media. I signed a deal with the devil (otherwise known as Murphy's Law) to make it happen, and it's only fair that I take the heat for it.