This weekend will be the first game of the season. With the first game, we have first game traditions. Since it is also our anniversary weekend, it really works out nice. The girls will stay with my parents and we will stay at a nice hotel in downtown Austin. Friday or Saturday we will go to the local Longhorn gear store and stock up for the season. For one meal we will go to Katz's Deli. The picture on the link shows the booths we usually sit in. I get a humongous cobb salad and for dessert, I mooch of my husband's shake with a slice of cheesecake in it. Yum!!!! Friday night we will go to a kick off party at our friends who host the tailgates. In my mind, the season officially begins when we walk up their stone walkway. I look at my husband, grab is hand, swing his arm as I take a baby hop, and say "This is it! A new season!" And he rolls his eyes. Sigh. Must be a chic thing.

I know that everyone is posting/reading/thinking about this. Here are a few links that are interesting.

Grunt Doc talks about patients coming into his Fort Worth Hospital.

He also had a link to satellite before and after pictures. The most amazing one is here.

I am mooching off the Texas State Wi-Fi and blogging from the tailgate. Everything is set up, we have the smoker going, tents up, and satelite hooked up with ESPN College Game Day on.

The spread on this game is 40, so it is amost an guarantee that we will win. And this is a very good thing.

We did not get to Katz last night, but made it for breakfast. Since I am not a big eggs/breakfast fan, I ordered the Cobb Salad. Yum!!!! Usually when you order lunch/dinner items at breakfast they are not as good as normal. But not in this case.

Last night we went to a party and visited with our "Football" friends and had a good time.

Checked in the my parents and the girls had fun at the County Fair last night.

All is well is my world. Woooo hoooo!

From a Texas fan's view, this was a good game for several reasons. Winning is good. The team looked good, except special teams. In previous years we have played easy teams and won, but we did not look good doing it. Meaning that we did not play was we should have. But not this year. The team looked good. Everyone feels better about playing Ohio State (who is a good team) next week.

When Texas plays easy teams and the score gets past a certain point, they put in their second and third string players to give them some "real" field experience. One of the player that they brought in was amazing. His name is Henry Melton. He is HUGE for his position. People are amazed at how fast and nimble is his. Most guys in his position average 210 pounds.

I think more people would have left, but they wanted to stay and watch Melton play.

I took my camera and played with my zoom lens. Also, my usual seat buddy was not there to talk to, so I was ready to go by the middle of the third quarter.

I have pictures and chic related stuff coming this week.

More guy-like details of the game here.

Check it out at Sissy's!

We are still looking for hosts the last two weeks of September and all of October. Details here.

Since 9/11, when the football team comes onto the field, one of the players holds an American flag. Previous years it was carried by Ahrmad Hall, who was a Marine.

The flag they are using this year was given to the team by a Navy-member who had the flag flown over Iraq. How cool is that?

My apoligies if my template looks funny. I am messing with different ways to do the columns. This one looks fine on my home pc, but overlaps on my work pc.

UPDATE: I fixed it by making my section graphics smaller. Does it look good to you? Is your resolution 800x600?

If you walk in on your kids and they are doing something they should not be doing, they start tattling on each other. "It was So-and-so!" "So-and-so was doing it."

Is that what the Lousiana Governor and New Orleans Mayor are doing?

Very interesting....

Don't forget to send you kid related entry to karnival.kidz(at)gmail(dot)com by Sunday!!!

We have our tickets to the Ohio State Game and will be catching a flight at 6 am today. That is why I am up at 2:30 am. Yikes! Once we get to our hotel in Columbus we will be taking a nap, I hope.

This is a big game and the media is really hyping it up. Let's hope we have fun.

After running to our connecting flight in the Detriot Airport, we made it to Dayton. Drove to Columbus, checked in, and headed for a late lunch at the Buckeye Hall of Fame Cafe. The food was good, but the margarita was better. We each got glasses to take with us. Mark said if Texas losses we will be throwing them away. I was surprised at the number of Longhorns there.

We then went back to the hotel for a nap before heading to a local bar to meet up with other Longhorn fans. It was amazing to see the look on the Ohio people when they walked in and saw all of the burnt orange. They were very friendly and a few even bought us a round of beers. I really enjoy the away games since we are with other die-hards and there is a certain kinship. Or it is just me being sappy.

Mark and a few of the guys even had an intense conversation with some Ohio State Fans about who was going to win. Not much smack talk, but some football speak about who was better and why.

Over the years we have become really good friends with another Longhorn fan couple from Pennsylvania. We went in on the tickets to make sure if we could not get seats in the Longhorn section we would be with some other Longhorns. (Major concern over the fans has been mentioned here before.) A&A met us at our hotel and we taxied over to the bar where the other Longhorn fans were. Taking a taxi was recommended since parking was sparse. When we got there I noticed there were a few spaces open. _{(foreshadowing comment)} (time of day: 10:30 am)

We had fun hanging out at the bar and A the Wife and I got a few laughs about being Football wifes. We ended up walking around talking to others since the guys were talking all football techno/stats/blabber. Stuff we are not really into. Every once in awhile we would interupt them, but they always returned to the "serious" football talk. Since we knew we had a long evening to come, we had a Red Bull Bomb before we headed to the stadium. Jagermeister and Red Bull, a little heavy on the Jager. It was pretty good together for not liking either by themselves. And it helped on the 1 mile walk to the Ohio State Stadium. (time of day: 5:30pm)

The walk was relatively uneventful. We are used to hearing smack talk at away games. But I was not used to the number of times that we would hear F*** Texas. Yes, people went out of their way to make sure we heard them and even went to the trouble of rolling down car windows.

Pictures coming and more on the rest of the game tomorrow.

The football team is taking action photos submitted by fans. Last week I got a nice shot of Selvin Young's touchdown the 1st quarter. The link to the slide show of all the submissions is here. Mine is the first photo, so you may want to hit pause real quick to see it before it disappears.

Or you can see it here.

The game was very "rollercoastery." We would do good, then do bad, then do good, then bad. With 6 minutes left in the game, I knew that was it. If we did not stop them we were going to lose. But when Ohio State did not make a field goal, we got our chance back. And ended up winning. For the nitty gritty go here.

The stadium was awesome and the Ohio State fans were loud. Attendance was 105,565, an Ohio State record. The band was good and they even played our school song after the game was over. I tried to get a panoramic view of the stadium with a little luck. I did not attempt to make the pictures blend since they were so different, but I think you will get the feel of it. Click here to view the image.

To see more pictures click here.

Coming tomorrow: After the game and getting home....

We have gone to quite a few away games, but never have I been scared or concerned for our safety. But after the Ohio State game I was. We had to walk slow since A pulled a muscle in her foot. Even though they lost, fans were jeering at us. One girl jumped in front of Mark and babbled something. He just ignored her and it made her even more mad. Another guy told us that Bush sucked and Texas sucked and it was our fault he was president. (Wasn't Ohio a swing state?)

We walked back to the bar that we had been to earlier to get our friends cooler and to get a taxi back to the hotel. We ended up waiting 2 hours trying to get a taxi with no luck. During that time we had people jeering at us and watched an almost fight between some locals. We finally got a ride back to the hotel from a friend who had her rental with her. Time of day - 2:30am.

Up at 6 am to drive back to Dayton and catch our flight home.

Whew! What a weekend!

Taken from an email from our friend that we meet up with in Columbus:

Google now has a blog search engine at http://blogsearch.google.com/

Looks pretty neat....

Oldest came to me and asked: "Can I have more milk please?"

I was in the middle of reading something on my computer, so I slowly pulled away from it and looked at her for a second.

She smiled.

I said "Can I have a hug first, please?"

She said "You don't have to say please to get a hug from me."

If we played with Ohio State on a regular basis, we would not be spending very much money in their city. Since the fans are so awful, we would come in for the game and leave after. And I am sure there are fans from other schools who play Ohio State on a regular basis that do the same. So ultimately the bad fans are hurting their city and it's economy.

Other stories I have heard:

The security detail for the Longhorn Band had to leave them to take care of a riot.

People were burning stuff in the parking lots.

Some Ohio State fans were throwing beer cans and hard objects at UT fans.

We were not the only ones to get the finger and hear F*** Texas many times.

Arg!!! Thank goodness we will not be going back soon. I am done with this.

Since Rice is not as good as Texas, this game was a romp and lost my attention by the end of the 2nd quarter. So not much to say on the game. I read an article where the coach of Rice admitted they played Texas for the money. This year they got $500,000.

A couple we know from Elena's school came up and hung out with us at the tailgates. I think they had a good time. It was fun sharing what we do and it made me realize again how much I enjoy it. And how much I appreciate knowing a lot of people and the long term friendships we are forming. This is the 7th year we have had season tickets. That is a long time for a military brat.

OK, I heard a really bad joke today. But it made me laugh. I put it in the extended entry for those who want to avoid tacky and bad jokes.

Radio Blogger has a post of interest and a prediction of a new movement:

"Don't Get Stuck on Stupid."

Hat tip to my hubby!

Sissy is starting the trash talk early. But I will add some interest to this smack. She thinks that Missouri will win against Texas. I have to disagree. But if Mizzou does win, I will put one of the logo from Sissy's post on my blog for a week. If Texas wins, well, I have my methods of posting on her blog. Bwahahahahaha!!!!

Yesterday evening we lost power to our server room at the company I work for. Even though I had the luxury to take a few naps in between updates, troubleshooting, and helping, I am still very tired. But not as tired as the guys who stayed up all night and the next day to get things going. I used three bags of coffee in one pot this morning and ran down to the little store for Red Bull. They all made it through and are probably sleeping good now.

It is great working with people who will do what it takes when it is needed.

Now after a wind down with blog reading and a nice cool drink for my thrist, I will be off to bed.

Note to husband: Thanks for letting us pick something up instead of having to make dinner.

Note to Mom: This puts a kink into my cleaning plans for your visit this weekend. Wah!!!

Notice the asterisk? I thought it would be something like "We will donate up to $xxx,xxx." But not so!

How cool is that? More details of their support here.

Question #1: The exit for my office has two sets of doors. If you are leaving or coming in, many people will hold the doors for you as they walk out. I always feel funny thanking them for each door. What if I only thank them for one door and assume it carries over for the other? Do I thank on the 1st door or the last door? Or do I just thank for each door?

Question #2: We went to Chili's the other night and the girls "Colored a Chili" and donated $1 each to the St. Jude Research Foundation. I gave the waitress $2.00 in cash for them. When we got the bill it showed that she also charged me on my credit card. I thought about saying something, but since the money was going to a charity, I thought I might come across as petty. My husband thought the waitress may have pocketed our $2 cash. Would you have said something? Or just let it go? Or make sure she gave the cash to the charity also? I ended up not saying anything.

Now that the girls understand the basics of the game Sorry, we are taking up a notch. Now they understand the concept of getting someone so they don't win instead of just taking the "best" move for them. I wonder how long until it becomes cut-throat?

Talking with a fellow Texas Football Fanatic Wife, we realized that we wanted to have some clue about the teams we were playing. That way we are not totally out of it when our husbands are blabbing football stuff. And we have different questions about the team than they do. You know, chic stuff!!! So look for the pre-game info posts coming up....

This week we play the University of Missouri at Columbia, MO.

MASCOT: Tigers. History behind the tigers under Traditions.

Colors: Black and Gold

Main Rival(s): Univeristy of Kansas (see Traditions) and Nebraska (per Sissy)

Traditions: Click here.

Misc: Basketball is more popular than football.

Famous/Known/Great Player(s): Brad Smith: Senior Quartback with tons of awards. Click on his name for more.

As of Sunday, 9/25: Missouri has played 3 games and only lost once*. Their last game was against 10th ranked Kansas State with a score of 38-0. Missouri is not ranked. Texas is ranked 2nd under USC.

Spread: -14

My version of the Hubby's take*: They have a bad defense and a decent offense. We will beat Missouri if we don't turn the ball over and don't think we can win by just showing up. _{*He did not say this exactly, but close enough.}

*I had the wrong info originally. Bah to stats!

May not be related to Texas, but it is still a nice story. I heard about it on the radio today and found the link to the story at CalTechGirl's.

OK, I am not a cat or a mouse, but I do know how to play!

I have sympathy for the victims of the hurricane, but after reading an article, I realize I have empathy for Michael Brown. A huge natural disaster like we have not seen in our lifetimes and Michael Brown is the "official" scape goat. Michael Brown went in front of Congress in a hearing today. To his face, in public he was reprimanded for not doing a good enough job. IN PUBLIC, he was told:

"I'm happy you left," said Rep. Christopher Shays (news, bio, voting record), R-Conn. "Because that kind of, you know, look in the lights like a deer tells me that you weren't capable to do the job."

"You get an F-minus in my book," said Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss.

"I don't know how you can sleep at night," Granger said. "You lost the battle." R-Texas.

"Maybe the president made a very good move when he asked you to leave your job." _ Taylor.

"We were prepared but overwhelmed is the best way I can put it. We knew what to do. We knew how to do it. But because we're stretched thin, because we still had these logistical problems, it quickly overwhelmed us." _ Brown.

"I know what death and destruction is and I know how much people suffer," Brown told Taylor. "And it breaks my heart. I pray for these people every night. So don't lecture me about knowing what disaster is like." _ Brown.

"I probably should have just resigned my post earlier and gone public with some of these things because I have a great admiration for the men and women of FEMA and what they do, and they don't deserve what they've been getting." _ Brown

Sources of quotes here and here. Hat tip to Right Rainbow.

Update: This makes me feel better. I need to find the video.

Yesterday, while I was cooking dinner, it was unusually quiet. The girls were watching Kim Possible sitting unusually like this:

Could not resist getting my camera. Youngest could not resist smiling for me.

...a bra that does not fit makes for a very uncomfortable day.

BCS Poll changes via The Onion.

hat tip to Annika.