So it goes...

Between the two teams I cheer for, Minnesota and Green Bay, today will mark the 17th NFC Championship game that I've watched actually means something to me. The Packers will meet the Forty Niners to determine who goes to the Super Bowl as the NFC representative. Seventeen. That's a lot of games. My copies of the XXI & XXXII Super Bowl programs Of those games though, I've only been on the winning side six times, three each for the Packers and Vikings. That means my disappointments outnumber my euphoric moments by a margin of almost 2:1. There have been some heart breakers for sure, almost too many to list. For the Vikings there were: The Cowboys Hail Mary pass The Gary Anderson missed field goal in the Randall Cunningham years The 41-0 stomping at the hands of the NY Giants during the Randy Moss years The infamous Brett Favre interception versus New Orleans The recent beating at the hands of the  Eagles And as a Packer fan, I've had my heartbrea...

This afternoon I will sit down and watch another Playoff Packer game - one of my favorite winter pleasures, especially if they play well and win. It's what I will be watching it on that is a little funny. If you know my family, you know that TV is not a high priority. It's barely a thing, actually. I remember when HD flat screens came out, and I'm not talking the kind that you hang on your wall, I'm talking about tube TV's that had a flat screen instead of curved. Well, we had an old 25" Magnavox that had a curved screen and we were VERY late to the party in upgrading to the flat screen HD TV that we currently still use. We tend to drag our feet on upgrades around here until something breaks, especially something that we don't use much. So we bought our 300 LB tube-based HDTV in part because our in-laws had the same model and we loved the picture. At the time it was the waning technology with "hang on your wall" thin TV's on the cusp of ...

I spent this morning at a great workshop on marketing your work, submission guidelines and the like. It was at allwriters and there were 12 of us there; 11 women and me. Talk about the odd man out. (Or just the odd man, if you know me.) It was an outstanding look into the intricacies and nuances of getting your work out there and published. There was a ton of invaluable information about query letters, cover letters, synopsis, agenting, and more. We were given a ton of links to great sites for researching the market, as well as a number of good books on the subject. It actually inspired me enough to go home and submit a work of memoir to a magazine I'd found on one of the research links. The piece is on some of the cats we had when I was a kid. It is a dark humor kind of piece talking about their lives in a household of six kids, their untimely deaths or other ultimate fate. I changed it up a bit from when I had written it a year ago and let it fly. The magazine doesn't pay any...

I stayed home with Ben today. He is feeling horrible, sniffling, fever and a sore throat. He started fading on Saturday night, and has gone downhill until today. He'll likely miss at least one more day of school, poor boy. It always pains me to see my kids sick. I know the feeling all too well, and it sucks. All you can think about is feeling better. Hopefully it's not strep throat and he'll be back on his feet in a couple of days. Well, the old Packers did not disappoint this weekend. It's almost too good to be true. If you'd have said at the beginning of the season that they would be in the super bowl, even without all the injuries they had this year, I would have called you crazy. I still thought they were a year or two, and a star player or two away from having a super bowl team. I think Rodgers carried much of the team this year, but really it was a team effort. Many guys contributed, even unknown names like John Kuhn, and Sam Shields. So we're going to get...