Bracket Busted?

Is your bracket busted before the first weekend is over? Yeah me too. As usual, my upset reads did not come in during the first round and I fell a couple off the pace. Then yesterday the coup de grace: thanks West Virginia, now I can cheer for Big Ten teams and underdogs the rest of the way. Back in high school, I used to run the regular bracket contest and my tennis buddy Brandon would run a Sweet 16 pool for those whose bracket is busted by the first weekend (that being 80% of the people who try to pick the Madness). Like many other years, it would be good to have one of those again...

Speaking of basketball, the Lady Buckeyes choked for the third straight year in March Madness last night. Two years ago they were a 1 seed and lost in the second round to #9 Boston College, last year they were a #4 and lost to #13 Marist in the first round, last night they were a #6 and were upset in the first round yet again by #11 Florida State. Jim Foster knows how to win Big Ten titles (4 in a row), but he's got to figure out something to do for the dance. I was correct about Ohio State's men's team being in better shape to learn for next year by going to the NIT, and after a solid game against UNCA they get California Monday night. I've got another credential, and Larry and I have tickets to the game as well (we're dragging along a third to sit in my paid seat). Should be good times, and hopefully next week we'll be looking forward to another trip to NYC for a NIT final four (the Buckeyes made the preseason NIT final as well this season).

Oh, before I forget...I promised this comment to a couple of people...

FUCK YOU TWEEN-TARDS!

Just when I thought American Idol fans had some modicum of taste and wanted some different styles of performers this season on the summer tour (the top 10 make that tour), they go and cut my girl Amanda this week. Well I hope all you tween-tards enjoy KKK-Kristy Lee Cook and her absolutely awesome Dolly Parton remakes of rock songs. Plus, the tween-tards inexplicably put Carly in the bottom 3...did we forget about her this week? So inconsistent...we'll hope the Top 10 does a better job this week than the Top 11 did this week. Wait, what am I saying, with the exception of Archuleta it simply has to be better!

Oh and one more thing, the result show seriously needs cut down to a half hour, or even better, a 3 minute press conference. The Idols they bring back to sing show how poor this season's contestants really are, and the quirky phone calls to say things to Simon or ask wank-wank questions to wank-wank contestants like Ramiele and Jason. Please stop.

On the bright side, REAL TV IS COMING BACK NEXT MONTH! Lost will be wrapping up its short season, House finally comes back for some regular episodes with the new team (which I will call Team Kumar now that I've realized one of the three is Kumar from Harold & Kumar), and the Moment of Truth will finally not be the second best show on Fox.

Watched I Am Legend last night. Pretty solid performance in Will Smith's version of Cast Away. Definitely worth watching a few more times. Also finally got through The Break-Up (bleh), Hot Fuzz (slow at first but pretty funny), and Michael Clayton (OK, need to see again to fully appreciate it) this week. Stick with the Blockbusters, and not the ones according to the Oscars, at least for now.

Spring break from law school was very relaxing, and now we'll be in the stretch run for the MPRE re-do in a couple weeks and then finals in 6-7 weeks. I ignored journal work too much while watching basketball, oh well. Just makes for busy evenings. We'll get Issues 3-4 out eventually. Everything seems calmer now that Issue 1 is in the hands of the subscribers. It also did not help that the first of 7 notes I have to read for good faith did not meet good faith at all. I swear sometimes people forget that writing a note is for a credit hour...I mean, how could you turn in something that has clearly never been spellchecked, let alone proofread? How unprofessional.

Spent last Sunday with Aaron and Larry, playing 4-player Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The game is very good as a party game, right up with the high standards of the other Wii titles so far. Now if they could just get some good sports and third-party support. Yes I mean Rock Band. The real reason we had them over was to hear about last weekend's ABA moot court competition (the other top moot court teams, along with our National teams from the fall). Well they have a lot of stories, which happens when you do moot court and especially with Brian. I'm not going to tell the stories myself, but needless to say the experience more than lived up to what happened at the Gibbons competition last year. At least I have five more people who completely understand what I wrote this time last year...big middle finger to Ms. Brewer and all others who decided to pitch a fit about speaking the truth in your own personal blog. Some people take small stuff too seriously, while neglecting their duties to investigate the real problems with the moot court program. But before I forget, props to Tiffany and Chad for Top 10 oralist awards and kudos to Aaron/Tiffany/Brodie for almost overcoming the inevitable crappy first round judging.

Bowling playoffs were pushed off a week very late on Wednesday, so only the teams who anticipated being in the playoffs showed up for the final regular season week. We swept without Brodie because we were going against Aaron's absent team, so we are in the Top 8 for sure and I think we'll bowl against the Eckenrode team. I think we've only bowled against them once if at all, so that will be nice to get in one battle against a fellow 3L team before hooding.

Roadtripping to Valparaiso Indiana this week for Lutheran March Madness. The national Lutheran invitational basketball tournament for 7-8th graders is next weekend, and my little sister C.J. is playing in her final games before high school. (Plus, it's as close as her traveling team gets to Ohio for games) She was pretty good the last time I saw her, and apparently she's tops on her team. We'll be able to see her first two games, and hopefully they place well in the 32 team tournament. So that's the big thing on tap for this week, that and Kelley's second doctor's appointment.

One more thing before I go: I promised a little about the house, and now we have the lease signed. It's over on the west side of town, about midway between I-74 and US-50 south of Cheviot. The drive is about 20 minutes to downtown, which is reasonable. The house has a nice big fenced-in yard and a paved patio to put the grill and a table on. The house itself has two floors and a basement. The first floor is relatively small, featuring two rooms and one walk-in closet. We'll use those rooms as the master bedroom and the baby's room. On the main floor there are four main rooms all connected to each other and a bathroom. I think our plan is to make a formal dining room, a living room similar to our upstairs living room now, and a regular dining room with our casual kitchen table and the piano. The kitchen is the other room. There's also a very small one car garage on the ground level, connected to the basement. Downstairs is like a cave, with winding passages a lots of room. Half the basement is finished, so that will be the second living room / poker and game room / bar. It actually has a bar in the finished half, so perhaps that will be a place to store our liquor. The unfinished half has a small back storage room under the garage which should be able to suit our storage needs, a laundry room, and a large unfinished space which can be more storage or utility space (since the garage is so small).

We've just started the process of prepping for the move in a couple months. Kelley is going through all her clothes and donating a bunch she doesn't wear anymore. My first downsizing project was video games. There's a lot of NES/SNES/N64 stuff I'm never going to pull out again unless it's right there on the shelf, so I ordered a NES/SNES retro duo combo system this week and pared through my collection of games to keep the best and the ones I will play again (plus a lot I can get rid of thanks to downloading them on Wii's virtual console). So that's over one storage tote gone for me sometime in the next two weeks once it sells, and we'll finally have a retor gaming system out that we can play with friends. Yes this means I'll have Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam Daniel and Larry, so I'll expect regular visits to Cincinnati to relive our Nintendo closet days in the journal suite. I think the next thing after that will be clothes for me as well, as there's definitely some stuff that can go for me as well. Then it will be onto storage boxes in the storage space...there's got to be stuff packed away I don't want anymore. One thing that will be nice once we get to the new house is buying 3-4 more bookshelves to put out all our books instead of storing them in boxes. But enough on that, back to the super-exciting Villanova blowout of Siena. I love when the CBS schedule fails miserably...