1am wakeup call

If you haven't gotten the message, I am a huge NFL fan. So I checked my satellite schedule and noticed that one of the sports channels would be showing a live game at 1am my time. So I set my alarm this morning and woke up faintly hoping that the game that would be shown would be the Raven's game. Well it wasn't the Raven's game, but it was the New Orleans Saints against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. While it was the NFC and I didn't have any affiliation with either team, I was super excited to be able to watch the game. The game was okay until the second half when the teams started to score a bunch of touchdowns. Right now I am struggling a little bit at work, but I think I can get through it. Luckily next weekend we have Monday off, so I can get up again and enjoy another random game (the Raven's are supposed to play at 4:15am my time next week, so maybe I will just get up a couple of hours later next week). Nonetheless, I was so happy to be able to watch some football, it's great that the season has started. By the way, the Raven's win doesn't convince me that they will do that great this season, mainly because they scored on two plays that you won't get a score on all that often and the Cincinnati Bengals look to be one of the worst teams in the league this year, so still hoping for 6 wins this season, we shall see.

WTF = Hilarious

Last week I was involved with a fantasy football draft. I do these things not for the competition, but just for the fun of keeping up with NFL stats. In the league that we were drafting last week, we have 10 teams in the league and only about 4 people showed up for the draft, so the rest of the teams had set up for autopicks, which for those of you not familiar, you can pre-rank your players so that they are drafted in an order other then the defaulted rankings by ESPN. So unless you have pre-ranked your players, you will just get the default players based on the ranking on ESPN.

Our total draft has 20 rounds, which means that there are 200 picks in total. For those of you not that familiar, you typically use the first 4 or 5 rounds to select your skilled positions (running backs, quarterbacks, wide receivers). We are playing with individual defensive players, so we have more starters then the regular teams, which means after you have selected skill positions along with their backups you tend to move to defensive players and move to the kickers and your bench players (mostly because the skilled positions give you most of your points and the kicker only gives you a couple of points each week). In short most people in the draft didn't draft a kicker until well after the 13th round, except for one team.

This one team selected a kicker, Nate Kaeding, for the number 11 pick overall. Right in the middle of people taking the best running backs and quarterbacks, one team picked a kicker. Needless to say, all the people that were participating the draft started lighting up the chat feature in the draft. This is where the funniest moment happened, someone just typed in the infamous 3 letter abbreviation, WTF. Now don't get me wrong, this abbreviation is not a good thing and should not be used, but in the context of what happened, it made me sit back and laugh at my desk. I am not a fan of the texting/internet chatting abbreviations that are becoming more coming (LOL, LMAO, IMHO, etc), but this abbreviation, when used in the right situation, is one of the funniest things that someone can type.

The Dark Knight...wait I'm confused

The other night I was able to watch The Dark Knight, which is conveniently already out on DVD here in China (not saying whether it is legal or not). Unlike Robert Downey Jr, I actually understood the whole movie with the exception of one part. With Heath Ledger, the actor who played the Joker, dead in real life, I am confused (if you have not see the movie I am warning you that I talk about there ending right here, so skip over this post if you do not want to know parts of the ending) why they didn't kill off the Joker in the movie. I am no movie magician, but there was a part at the end that could have been re-edited to show the Joker dying. By keeping him alive, either they are going to have to have another actor take the place of Ledger in the next movie or totally make the Joker irrelevant in the next movie or someone explain that the Joker died in between the movies, all of which don't make any sense when they could have easily killed him in this movie. Anyway, I am just confused as to how they could complicate the situation, but I guess they are trying to make the next one even more intriguing, too bad I am not that much more intrigued.

A little PTL Time

So we decided to add a little flare to our dinner time prayer by adding clapping to a beat (quite a big step for our dinner time prayer). Well both the kids had their eyes closed and we were clapping and singing the prayer. When we got to the Amen part, Renee turned to Maddie and said, "Maddie?" Trying to get Maddie to also say Amen, but all of the sudden, with her eyes closed she had some sort of uncharacteriscally charismatic moment when she extended her arms out and proclaimed, "PRAISE THE LORD!!" Being attendees of Presbyterian churches, Renee and I were quite taken aback by such a charismatic moment at the end of our prayer. Nonetheless, we looked at each other and couldn't help laughing out loud. It was by far one of the funniest things to happen in our house in the past couple of months.

By the way, after asking Maddie where she learned to do that, she just proclaimed that she was not sure, which could only mean that it was the Holy Spirit getting her pumped up from our clapping and singing.

There are two of them?????

So do you remember this post??? Well there appears to be a second subway humping offender. It just so happens that I was on my way home after work yesterday when the subway started clearing out. It just so happened that in my general vicinity was a middle aged local man along with a couple of college/school aged girls. All the sudden the train started moving, the man closed his eyes (to really soak in the subway atmosphere) and began to sway his hips back and forth. This second offender appeared to be desiring to have relations with someone, so he decided to take it out on my good friend, the air. Yes, the man started to hump the imaginary air. Having already experienced this, I remained unphased, but the people around him began to clear out pretty fast. I mean, is the air really that good looking???

Haiku

No, I am not going to try to write a Haiku for you (although my 6th grade Haiku writing skills aren't too shabby) Today, I went out to lunch with some colleagues to a "trendy" sushi restaurant called Haiku. As I prepare to go to Japan in December, I have been going through a Japanese food kick, to try to find good Japanese food in Shanghai to try to have something to compare to the real stuff in Japan. Actually, even though proximity wise, we are much closer to Japan then in the US, the Japanese food is not that great here, so I have really yet to find a place that I tell people that they need to try when they are in town. This place serves both the legit sushi and sashimi that are for the die hard Japanese food people, and they also serve American style sushi rolls (you know, the kind with cream cheese and all the stuff inside of it). I had read and heard a lot of good comments on it and to be honest, the place didn't disappoint. It will probably run between $15-$20USD per person (luckily I didn't have to flip the bill on this one), but if you want some good quality seafood in your sushi, then you will have to pay that kind of price here in Shanghai. It was by far the best sushi I have had in Shanghai, but not the best I have had in my life (that goes to a little place in old town Alexandria, VA). The rolls were right on tap with those that you can get in the US, and the raw fish on the legit sushi tasted fresh and was well prepared (or as prepared as raw fish can get). Actually, I think I am becoming less of a rolls type of guy because there is usually so much stuff on them that they mask the flavor of the fish (yes I realize that is the point of them in the US as many places don't have the best quality fish, so they just mask the quality of the fish by adding a bunch of stuff like avocado, cream cheese and sauces). Anyway, this place is a good start on my adventure to find Japanese food in Shanghai to compare against the real stuff in a couple of months.

Update

You might have noticed that there were a couple of posts where I mentioned sleepless nights and a little guest that was staying with us. Well, I wanted to avoid coming out and giving exacts as it is not exactly the most legal process over here. But you probably figured out that we were taking care of a little baby that was in Shanghai recovering. I can tell you that we had a great time taking care of the little one, but not without the frustrations. Basically Sunday night was the first night since the 10th of July that I had gotten a full night's sleep, and even then I was woke up a few times just because my body was used to it. The baby was great to have around, our eyes were really opened up to what it is to take care of a recovering special needs baby along with what it would be like to be taking care of a third child. I really think the hardest part was trying to balance the lack of sleep with still trying to have high energy for Maddie and Jacob. Actually, now that the little one is gone, going back to taking care of 2 kids seems like a walk in the park I mean not having another little one screaming in the background really helps. Now I guess it is back to having sleep filled nights and riding bikes again.