Details

I suppose more details are in order regarding the last post. I'll get the trivial stuff out of the way first, simply because it's easier to write about.

I've been busy. Too busy to write much. Right after the W/B trip, I was called into action and sent to Moscow, which as I said, is not very hospitable in January. I had only a short time between the time I was notified I was leaving and the time I actually left, so I called up Matty and asked him would he please TiVo any and all of the Seahawks playoff games. He said "sure thing". Just in case, I called up my parents and asked my dad to record them on the VCR. It took a while to convince him that the Patriots and Seahawks would not be playing two separate games at the same time, but eventually he believed me and said he'd do what he could. As a last measure, I asked the Tech Guys to record the games to MPEG so at worst I could watch them on a computer screen when I got back.

Everyone failed me miserably.

Matty TiVoed the games, but didn't mark them "Save Until I Delete", so they were overwritten by Grey's Anatomy and all of the other crap that his wife taped. My dad couldn't figure out how to get the VCR to work. He only had a month. And when I asked the Tech Guys about it, the response was "You were serious about that?" So like I said, I thought I was going to have to buy the Steelers Super Bowl Champs DVD when it came out, but luckily Keith found a torrent of the Super Bowl somewhere online. It took forever to download, but eventually he burned it onto DVD for me and I watched it, horrible resolution and all, on my TV at home.

The Seahawks got hosed.

Look, I realize it's been more than a month since the Super Bowl. I don't care. I just saw it. I may have seen officiating as egregiously poor as that game, but it certainly wasn't as one-sided as Super Bowl XL. A lot of people around here subscribe to the theory that officials don't lose games, the players do. That's a bunch of crap. In any game, you have X number of opportunities to win. When the officials start taking away those opportunities, and giving them to the other team, it's possible for a team to overcome the odds and win, but the officials are still responsible for what happens. Anyway, it was over a month ago. I should probably just let it go.

So, so angry

Where to begin? There is so much. Where to begin?

Let's start by saying that if you think Moscow is fun in the middle of January, you are sorely mistaken. It's not a vacation paradise in the summer, let alone when it's so damned frigid that the top news story isn't Chechnya or the Ukraine, but the number of people who are dying from the cold. Spending a month in mostly sub-zero temperatures is pretty bad in and of itself, but Abby and Gruber have more to complain about. Abby got herself shot and Gruber got frostbite, had two toes amputated, and the whole mission went downhill from there.

On top of all that, when it was discovered that I was being shipped out of the country on short notice, I asked in all seriousness if someone could tape any Seahawks playoff games that should happen to occur while I was gone, only to return and find out that, no, no one actually thought I was serious about that request, so now I'm going to have to go out a buy a Steelers Super Bowl DVD to find out what happened, and what happened is apparently that the Seahawks got completely screwed by the refs. I've been reading about it since I got back, but I assure you that reading archived stories about the Super Bowl is no replacement for watching the actual game. Thanks, guys.

As if that weren't enough, I received somewhere between 60 and 70 phone calls from my quasi-girlfriend, who left only two messages but apparently doesn't know what Caller ID is. This is about the last thing I'm going to worry about, but the thing that will drive me the most insane until I get everything back in order, since the calls seem to come on a fairly regular basis.

I'm gonna have to break this down into pieces. Right now, I'm hungry.