Getting sleepy

I had an awful week picking NFL games. I blame the short week and not enough time to do research since I went back to PA on Wednesday afternoon. Mom only has dialup at home and things take for-e-ver to load there. I had dialup at my first apartment in Bloomfield and I don't miss it. at. all.

It was the final week of volleyball playoffs tonight and I played another night of 'C' volleyball. That's not going to help us win, especially against the other good team in the league. They beat us 2 of 3 times during the regular season, but we beat them in the first match of the playoffs. Leah is on vacation in South Africa (good for her! bad for us!) and our rotation is a little off. Off enough to really affect us on the court. I feel like I gave away a few points in the first and third games which led to them getting a pretty big lead that we couldn't come back from.

We went out afterward which cheered us all up. Loaded cheese fries and beer will do that for us! The MNF game was terrible, but Joe, Liwayway, Susan, Larry and I had a good time. We ran into Laurent who is here from France working on some things with the robot and we had a good time with him too.

Oh! I hit 130mph on the way home on the parkway. That's a lot of fun. It feels like you're sitting on a rocket!

This was a total WTF day

• 900+ points to the good for Wall Street
• the Giants are letting the Browns march up and down the field (maybe that's just a MNF 2008 thing)
• most of my day at work

I'm not even going to try to explain points #1 or 2 since I haven't been paying complete attention to the game. I don't even know what made work so bad, except just a combination of everything. Marketing made a mess of a bunch of artworks that need approved by tomorrow, I have to give a presentation on the seminar I went to where I didn't enjoy or learn anything, and people kept talking about our group lunch tomorrow. That's not going to be a good time.

Like I said to LP earlier, I hope I can get uncranky in time to kick some butt at volleyball tomorrow night. We're playing the team that is tied with us for first place (13-5). She's bringing her videocamera to tape the games so I had better get my blocking in order before it gets on film! This could be a really good learning tool for some of the people who don't have as much of an organized volleyball background.

Forget the George Michael Sports Machine

We had the Brett Favre Interception Machine (tm) for a while tonight. They're making progress in the 4th quarter though, after recovering an onside kick. The deficit is down to 15 with 8 minutes left which is feasible if the defense can hold a few times...okay, forget I said that.

On a winning note, our volleyball team had a quick 3-0 match tonight. I've never seen so many aces in a match. The other team couldn't pass at all so we took turns getting lots of points on our serves.

My trip to the grocery store was fruitful and uneventful. It was late enough that all the inconsiderate morons were already gone and I breezed through with my terribly unhealthy shopping list and made it home in plenty of time for...the Jets. It's a good thing that I didn't make an effort to hurry or I would have been even more disappointed.

Not quite Black, so about 75% Gray Monday

I'll at least start out with something positive. The Cowboys are up on the Eagles, 7-3, on a 72yd play to T.O. I have L.J. Smith tonight and am playing against Jason Witten and Patrick Crayton so Cowboy scores that do not include those two are welcomed by me.

We played 1.5 good games of volleyball tonight: the whole first game and half of the third. Unfortunately, it was the first half of the third game. We were up 9-0 and somehow gave that away. I think the final score was 15-13, but I could be wrong. Liwayway was upset that she didn't set well, so I told her: a) that she sings waaaaaayyyyy better than Cat Deluna did the national anthem tonight; b) to have some rainbow sherbet; and c) we'll practice some more on Wednesday since we're all still getting used to each other. I'm trying to be a little too fancy, especially when I set and I have to keep reminding myself to keep it simple.

There's a ton of cheering and I missed a 98yd kickoff return. I just went to the kitchen to get some Code Red! This game is getting ridic awfully quick. I'm not sure I want to leave to get dinner; what am I going to miss next!

Brian Westbrook, staple of past fantasy teams of mine, just scored after the Eagles were the beneficiary of a godawful defensive PI call. I'm definitely not going out until halftime, especially after the Eagles recover a Tony Romo fumble in the end zone. Hope you took the over tonight.

I hope Ana made it home with her new Mazda3 tonight. I helped her decide on new vs. used this afternoon. I wanted to push her toward used, but I know she had so much trouble at the end with Blue and I've always been more comfortable with the knowledge that nobody had a chance to do any damage.

I'm kind of putting off the inevitable followup to this morning's post about the lullaby of Broadway misery on Wall Street. Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 and their share price was $0.21 at close, $0.19 in after hours. There's going to be a mess trying to unwind some of the credit and derivative transactions that I'm not even going to try to begin to comprehend. AIG was down to $4.76 at close, $4.90 after hours. I was home at lunch and was reallocating some assets from some foreign ETFs to IVE and debated dumping the shares of AIG that I have. It was bouncing between $6.10 and $6.30 while I was here and decided that there had to be more upside than downside, although I think I read that if you get to that line of reasoning, you should be selling. I saw news that Berkshire was considering buying some AIG assets, but nothing has come of that so far. It looks like there will be some loans, possibly from their equity departments which I think violates a Fed rule, but again, I'm no expert here. A bit of good news: The way this year is going, I'm going to pay a lot less in taxes for 2008 than I have for the past couple years.

One thing I may be an expert on is that you have to have to break the plane of the goal line with the football in order to score. Good job DeSean Jackson -- I hope you get benched for the rest of the game.