Sad News

I regret to have to write that my wife's father passed away Saturday morning at around 4:30.

We'll be attending his funeral at 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon. It wasn't an unexpected thing, though. He had been ill for a long time.

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Sorry I've been absent for so long. Kathy's right (in the comments for the last entry), there are other things to write about than the Red Sox.

Wait. What am I saying??

Hahaha...

Lots of stuff has been happening. The Yankees are once again trying to buy there way back into the playoffs by sucking up all the good pitchers. And now I hear they are throwing in on the Teixeira chase. Ugh. I've pretty much decided I want to see Mark Teixeira wearing Red Sox. Even Boras said he would like to send Tex to the Sox, that way he could send Manny to the Nats. But the Evil Empire has expressed interest in Manny, too.

In the meantime, the Rangers want The Big Unit. Yes, folks, the Rangers are trying to sign Randy Johnson, the oldest pitcher in baseball. If not the oldest, then certainly the ugliest. You know, if they are going to go after oldness, I'd rather see them get Curt Schilling. I have no clue why they want Johnson.

Of course, I have no clue why they traded their only starting catcher for two minor league nobody pitchers, either. And that deal of massive stupidity (has Jon Daniels never learned anything????) messed things up for a lot of people. It eliminated the possibility of any deal between the Rangers and the Sox for one of their backup catchers, both of whom the Sox were definitely interested in. It eliminated the possibility of Varitek going to the Tigers (I'm actually kind of glad about that one, but it made for one less option for Tek). At least the Rangers management is aware that they need pitching!

Stephanie and I will, once again, be attending the "Sluggers of the West" awards banquet in January. We had a nice time at last year's banquet, and I managed not to "boo" at Tom Hicks. The crowd's reception of him was somewhat less than enthusiastic, though. We got some nice pictures of Stephanie with players after the banquet, though, and I'm hoping we can do that again, this time.

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In other news, we are rapidly approaching the end of our first semester of high school for Stephanie. At the moment, she is doing mostly ok. She's struggling with a science class, which they call "I.P.C." I think that means "Integrated Physics and Chemistry." It's supposed to be an easier level science class, but her teacher is not very good, from what I can gather. I'm hoping we can come up with some ways to raise that grade before the semester is over. She passed the first half, so we just need to get high enough to have a passing average for the semester.

Christi is doing mostly ok, after her father's passing. She is probably handling it better than most of the other family. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The last thing is that the company I work for is cutting our wages by 10% at the beginning of 2009! Ugh! That's putting us back close to 4 years! At least I have a job, right? But still...that's a pretty hefty chunk. I'm having to cut my 401k contributions to make up for it. The sad thing is, our division is actually making money. It's the divisions that are union that are killing us all. So we have to suffer for it. That's SNF! Hahahahah!!!

I think that's got us caught up for now. I need to work on getting the rest of my Christmas shopping done.

TTFN, y'all!