Thanksgiving Day Race

Congrats to Jim for winning the TurkeyDay Race, at least the Hankins/McCracken division. We lost touch during mile 1. Jim powered home in 54:11, to my 55:06. Very impressive when you consider the fact that he made a port-o-let stop at the halfway point.

Check out the results here.

The Kids' XBOX Achievements

Here's my XBOX Live Gamercard, which really lists the kids' acheivements, since they play under my profile. I've also posted it on the side of the blog so that everyone can see all of the skills they are developing.

Ellie's first Skyline

Our pre-Turkey Day dinner was at Skyline, the Cincinnati tradition. (Thanks for dinner , Jim.) It seemed like Ellie was digging the spaghetti and cheese, both eating it and flinging it. As Pam and I always said when the boys were younger, the best part about Skyline is leaving the mess behind for them to clean up. They earn those tips.

We Give Thanks for Our Family

We were happy to have everyone come to our place to celebrate Thanksgiving again. We were blessed to share our house and see everyone together for some food and fun. Hopefully nobody went home hungry.

Below is the set of photos we took from the day. We didn't get very many pictures of the actual eating portion of the day, but the ratio of Ellie to pictures is quite high.

2007 Thanksgiving

And thanks to Kay for creating the Turkey Day highlight - pumpkin pies, even in her hobbled condition!

Rounding Third and Heading for Home

The big (but sad) news in Cinci today is the passing of "The Ol' Lefthander" Joe Nuxhall, the longtime Reds broadcaster. I remember being seven years old, living on the farm, and listening to Marty and Joe on the radio every night during the summer when I went to sleep. Those were the days of the Big Red Machine, and as a little guy I had no idea how lucky I was to have such a great team to follow.

Cole and Zach were also lucky enough to catch the tail end of the Marty and Joe days on Reds radio. So they know who he was and the story about him being baseball's youngest player. Maybe someday they'll be sharing Reds games with their kids and telling them about the days when they used to listed to the young Thom Brennaman and "his dad" Marty.

Joe stopped doing the "Star of the Game Show" after Reds games quite a while back. (I suspect it was getting harder and harder to find players that would stick around and talk after games.) But, I'll always remember him talking to the great players from the Reds and other teams, and then signing off with his trademark -- "This is the old lefhander rounding third and heading for home."

There are lots of stories piling up about Joe and how great a man he was. This is one of my favorites of the ones I've seen so far. It's from John Fay, the Enquirer's Reds beat writer, on his Reds blog.

Talking about Nuxie

Dave "Yid" Armbruster, his long-time engineer, summed up perfectly how Joe Nuxhall made guys our age feel:

"He's like the best uncle you ever had. I thought of him like that. I thought of him as almost a father figure later. He was the cool uncle, who would talk to you the way most grownups wouldn't talk to you. That was my impression."

Bob Castellini, John Allen, Tom and Dick Williams, Tom Browning and Chuck Harmon were at the press gathering the Reds held to talk about Nuxie. So was the guy probably as close to Nuxie as anyone in the organization, clubhouse man Bernie Stowe.

"He grew on me like my big brother," Stowe said. "The game would be over. We'd be on the road and he'd say, 'let's go get a beer and a sandwich.' Everybody said how cheap he was. I guess he liked the little guy because he took care of me.

Stowe said through all his recent tough times Nuxie remained upbeat and was at peace.

"He'd say, 'We all got to die. They can't save me forever,'" Stowe said. "What a man."

Sunset on Lake Travis

Our project team had a dinner outing at place in Austin called the Oasis. The best part was the view of the sunset.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Turkey Day Race

I got confirmation from Jim that he's going to join me in running the Cinci Turkey Trot. And today Rachel told me she's going to run, if she can get Leslie to do it with her.

6.2 miles burns a lot of calories on a day when we all need to burn off a few extra.

See how we all did last time we ran that race together.

Sleeping on the Chisholm Trail

The hotel I've been staying at in Austin (actually it's in Round Rock which north of Austin) is on Chisholm Trail Road. I'd heard of the Chisholm Trail, but didn't know it's history. Turns out that the Trail was the path that Texas cowboys used following the Civil War to move cattle from Texas, where cattle were only worth $4 a head, up to Kansas, where they could get $40 a head. That's a long walk for a cow, and a long hard ride for a cowboy even if he is on a horse. But I suppose that 10x price difference would make an 800 mile trek worth while.

The Trail also gave Round Rock its name. The Trail crossed Brushy Creek, and the low water crossing spot was (and still is) marked by a round rock in the middle of the creek.

That concludes your Texas geography and history lesson. Carry on.

Good (Cold) Times

Zach and I had a fun, successful campout Saturday and night. It got pretty cold, but that didn't really slow us down. Zach's favorite part was "everything", but especially the War Games, which is when all the tribes meet in a field for relay games.

There's not much else to say but you can check out the pictures I took. Plenty of Zach's smiling face in there.

Camping

Zach and I are heading off to our Guides winter campout today. This is the first year Zach gets to go by himself since Cole "graduated" last year. It looks like it's going to be a cold night for us. The forecast calls for it to get down to 33, but I think we'll survive.

Look for some pictures when we return.

Calling all WAS Fans

This one is for those folks over in the nation's capital. Now back in Week 4 the Patriots rolled into Cinci for a Monday night matchup with the Bengals. The Pats weren't ever scared in that 34-13 victory over the clearly overmatched Bengals. But, my question is, what happened last week in that Pats/Skins game?

I think it's clear that the Skins are a far better team than our Bungles. So how did they get beatdown 52-7 by the scary good Belichicks? Heck it was even 52-0 for a while. Did Gibbs do something to get them riled up?

Halloween

Cole and Zach had a very good Halloween here in Lovetown. The weather was perfect, just a bit cool, but no jacket required. The extra hour of daylight thanks to extended DST was a welcome bonus too. We normally start trick or treating in the dark, but they were almost done by the time the sun set around 7:00.

I walked with the kids through our neighborhood, and Pam stayed back at the ranch and passed out the goodies to our visitors. At the beginning they had big plans to knock off all the houses in our neighborhood and then cross the street to another set of houses. But after an hour plus of hoofing around, they felt like heading home without the trek to another neighborhood. (It was probably almost 3 miles of walking since our 70+ houses aren't that close together.) Maybe it was a combination of tiredness and eagerness to tear into the candy.

Zach was Darth Vader and Cole was the "The Scream" from the famous Edvard Munch painting.

Both were pretty intimidating. One of the smaller neighborhood kids was scared of Darth and would cry and run to his dad whenever Zach walked by. Cole's mask was attached to a "pumping heart" which would pump dripping blood into the top of his mask. Several of the adult candy givers thought the blood dripping was pretty cool.

Most of the readers here saw these already, but I wanted to post them for historical purposes too.