My brother got married last month. As the unofficial family photographer I took a lot of pictures. I posted them on my Zenfolio page shortly after the wedding, but never got around to posting about it here. I’ve put a few of my favorites below, or you can go here for all 57 of them.
At the very bottom of this post is a real treat (sarcasm warning!). It’s the only recent picture of myself that I can stand to look at. It’s not good mind you, just tolerable.
Brandon and Keshia
Keshia
I realize that most of my readers are my computer science buddies. Most of you could care less about sports. You might have been hopeful that I wouldn’t post anything about football this week because Ole Miss didn’t play. In general, you’d be right, but too much happened this weekend to not say anything about it.
For the second time this year, three of the top four teams in the country lost. No. 5 Texas beat No. 1 Oklahoma by 10 points, No. 3 Missouri was beaten by No. 17 Oklahoma State, and No. 4 LSU got spanked by No. 11 Florida. Also of interest is unranked Mississippi State beating No. 13 Vanderbilt. It was bound to happen eventually.
In the new poll, Texas moves to No. 1, Alabama stays at No. 2 after an off week, Penn State moves into No. 3, and Oklahoma drops to No. 4, and Florida moves up to No. 5.
The remainder of Texas’ schedule is pretty rough. They play four teams currently in the top 16. The only currently ranked team Alabama has left to play is LSU. However, assuming they continue to win, they’ll end up in the SEC championship game where they are likely to face Florida or Georgia. The SEC championship game could easily decide who goes to the BCS championship game.
This year there are several really good one loss teams out there. Could this finally be the year college football gets talked into some sort of playoff system? Probably not, but it’s fun to dream.
Yesterday was an interesting day. My parents came up Friday night and spent the night. The primary purpose was for my dad to help me put up a ham radio antenna. We were mostly successful. I’ll elaborate in a future post.
Our antenna project was interrupted early on to take Cassie to the emergency room. She was sterilizing some pacifiers with boiling water, and when she took the pot off the stove the handle broke. She now has decent sized second degree burns on her stomach and left leg. They gave her a tetanus shot to prevent infection, some high-powered pain medicine, and some cream to put on the burn. She’s handling it very well. I would definitely take advantage of the situation more than she has. Lucky for me, she isn’t.
On any normal day Luke would have been right beside Cassie. Thankfully, yesterday wasn’t a normal day, and he was in the other room with my mom. Interestingly, one of my high school classmates was Cassie’s nurse in the ER. There were only 56 of us, and Belmont is over 100 miles from Oxford. I’d say the odds are low.
Yesterday afternoon Cassie was feeling well enough to go to the Southern Living Idea House in Taylor. My mom has been reading Southern Living for as long as I can remember, and she and my dad are planning to renovate their house next year. It was pretty interesting.
I watched the debate last night, though not as closely as I’ve watched the others. I thought it was basically a draw. People that agree with McCain still agree with him and likewise for Obama. The debates are, after all, really for the “undecideds.” A few observations:
I’m a little late with this, but yes, we lost to South Carolina last weekend. We jumped out to a 14-3 lead, but just couldn’t hold on. We only scored 3 points in the second half.
Last week, after our win over Florida, I optimistically predicted we would go 7-5 this season. While that’s still a possibility, I’m going to revise my prediction to 6-6. That’s us losing to Alabama, Auburn, and LSU, and winning over Arkansas, Louisiana-Monroe, and Mississippi State. We could certainly beat Auburn, but I think our chances of winning are worse than our chances of losing. We could certainly get beat by Arkansas or Mississippi State too, but we should beat both of them based on the season so far. Being 6-6 would make us bowl eligible, but not guarantee a bowl game. If we were to beat Auburn, I feel like we’d definitely get one.
We will not lose this weekend; we’re off. Our next game is against Alabama the next weekend. They are now ranked No. 2 in the country. It has just been announced that we’ll be humiliated in front of a national audience at 2:30pm on CBS that Saturday. Please forgive my pecimism.
As I mentioned in my last post, we took Luke to his first high school football game last Friday night in Belmont. As I expected, he had a good time. He enjoys being around people, and there were plenty of them at the game.
Toward the end of the third quarter we walked down to where the band was sitting so Cassie could say hi to her former band director. At Belmont the band takes a break during the third quarter, and when they started playing at the beginning of the fourth quarter, it got Luke’s attention very quickly. He loves music, and will “dance” to anything from his toy piano to a car alarm in the parking lot to someone tapping a spoon on the edge of a food container. Toby, one of the drummers and the brother of my best man, let Luke play with his drum. He was very interested, and at one point the band director commented that he was keeping a pretty good beat.
Luke playing Toby's drum.
Luke was wearing his new shoes that aren’t very snug, and they managed to fall under the bleachers not once, but twice. Luckily we were able to retrieve them.
Unfortunately, Belmont lost a close game after some questionable calls from the referees. Never a fun way to lose.
On Saturday, while Cassie went to a baby shower and took the boys shopping with her parents, I took my parents to Tishomingo State Park for a round of disc golf, which was a lot of fun. I think my dad really enjoyed it, so I’ve got someone in Belmont to play with now. I was pretty rusty after not having played for two months.
On Sunday my brother and his family and my grandmothers came to my parents’ house for lunch. It was a good way to end a fun weekend.
Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I haven’t had much time, and when I have had the time, I haven’t had the energy. I blame sleep deprivation.
Speaking of which, it’s gotten a little better. Luke started sleeping through the night a couple of weeks ago. I guess he thought mom and dad needed the rest. He had been getting up for a bottle around 1:00am or so for a long time. Last night he went to bed a little earlier than usual, and we forgot to give him his bedtime bottle. I was worried he would wake up in the middle of the night hungry, but he didn’t.
Liam’s been sleeping pretty good lately too. He still gets up every three hours to eat, but in between bottles he sleeps fairly soundly. Cassie and I both look forward to when he starts only getting up twice to eat. Of course, we can’t remember when Luke started doing that.
Luke’s swimming lessons have been going good. All of us have been looking forward to them. He’s definitely gotten more comfortable in the water. Next week will be his last week. Cassie’s tried to take some pictures, but it’s pretty dark in the Turner Center and none of them have turned out very good. We’ll keep trying.
I took off this afternoon, and we’re about to head to Belmont. Luke will be going to his first high school football game. I’m pretty sure it’ll be my first one since my brother graduated five years ago. I’m looking forward to it.