nette’s weblog

The Michigan softball team has become the first team east of the Mississippi to win the national championship. After losing to UCLA in the first game of the best-of-three, we won yesterday 5-2 and then today 4-1 in the 10th inning (a normal softball game only goes 7 innings.) Today’s game was amazing. We went down 0-1 early, but managed to tie it up in the 6th. In the ninth inning we faltered a bit defensively and let them get the bases loaded. But we managed to step up and play some great defense to keep the score tied. In the 10th, freshman Samantha Findlay hit a 3-run homer to take the lead. Then we just played some nice defense, led by pitcher Jennie Ritter, who played great throughout the tournament, despite the fact that she pitched nearly the whole time. Tomorrow I will go and greet the team with softball band. Congratulations to the Wolverines. They had an amazing season and really deserve to be the champs. Go Blue!

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I was worried I wouldn’t be as nerdy as Dan, but I was.

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Yes, that’s right. I am, or rather, we, the Softball Band, are, an “unfair advantage” for the Michigan softball team. After Michigan defeated Northwestern twice last week to win the Big Ten championship, the Northwestern coaches apparently filed a formal complaint saying that it was an unfair advantage to have a band playing the fight song and that the rules should be changed for the Big Ten tournament. First of all, the whole point of winning the regular season championship is that you get home field advantage during the tournament. Apparently, 10 out of 11 schools agreed that the band was an unfair advantage. That would be the 10 schools that don’t have a band. They were invited to bring their own bands, but of course, none of them did. They are also allowed to bring a CD so that when they score a run the pressbox will play their fight song. The “new rules” will only allow the fight song to be played after a run or at the end of the game. We were contemplating before the game last night how many songs we could come up with that weren’t “The Victors” but had some part of it in the song, like “Hoover Street Rag”, “Calyptors”, and even “Winter Tunes”, our arrangement of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”, which can have “The Victors” inserted into it very easily. But it turned out it didn’t matter. A couple guys went and talked to the Big Ten officials, who said to do whatever we wanted and we said we’d follow the official NCAA rule (also put in place because of us.) It’s rule 13-9.4 or something like that. We had lots of fun at the game saying things like, “Cheering is an unfair advantage!” and “Hey, she’s too short! That’s an unfair advantage!” (There’s this one MSU player who is incredibly short. I don’t think she has a strike zone.) If we play Northwestern again (it would have to be in the final game on Saturday) we might have to follow their stupid rules, because they would probably complain. I’m sure we can find ways to make up for it, though. At any rate, I think it’s cool that people consider us an unfair advantage. Go Blue!

Also, Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.

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There is this website where you can create your own South Park character. Dan posted his on his blog, and I thought it was neat (even though I don’t really watch South Park), so I made them for me and Morgan, too. Here is me:

and here is Morgan:

Aren’t we cute? If you want to make your own South Park character, go here.

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As you can see, I now have a new theme. Yay, no more stupid ugly default theme! I am apparently very picky. I went through hundreds of themes and didn’t like very many of them. I also thought about using this theme, because it’s very cool looking. But it only lists the titles of each entry instead of the entry, so you have to click on it to read it. I thought people might not like that. So, anyway, right now you get this blue theme.

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This is my first blog from my cute new laptop. It’s a Dell 700m, which is a tiny widescreen laptop. There are a few things about the keyboard that I’m not used to yet, but I really like it. It’s much quieter and cooler than my last laptop and the usb and wireless are not iffy anymore. I do miss my scroll buttons, though. I’m having to learn to scroll using the touchpad. I can scroll down, but not up very well.
Also, as you can probably see, my blog has been upgraded like Dan’s. The themes don’t work yet, though, which is too bad. I don’t really like this default theme.

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Which Buffy The Vampire Slayer Character Are You Most Like!?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Buffy Summers. You are a very strong individual. You do, however, have some trouble admitting how you truely feel. You’ve experienced a lot during your life, but you more than manage. Always willing to help, you’re a great friend. Buffy Summers 71% Rupert Giles 58% Anya 50% Willow Rosenberg 46% Tara Maclay 46% Dawn Summers 42% Xander Harris 42% Spike 33%

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Sorry for not blogging in so long. I’m a slacker. Or else I just never have anything to say. Anyway, the Patriots are now officially a dynasty in the football world. They just won their 3rd superbowl in 4 years. The announcers have been saying all year that if they could win again they would be a dynasty, and now they can finally stop saying “if”. What is impressive about this is that they are the first team to be this dominant since the salary cap was started. Since teams can’t just buy up all the talented players, they have to actually play as a team (imagine that.) I really like that. The Patriots don’t have a lot of superstar players, but everyone on the team plays hard and contributes, and it has lead them to a lot of success. So it’s cool. On a semi-related note, both of my fantasy football quarterbacks (Brady and McNabb) were in the superbowl. I just thought that was cool.

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I need a new cell phone. Mine is really old at this point, and has recently been having problems. In particular, the battery falls off too easily, and it shuts itself off at random times. The shutting itself off may be related to the battery thing, because if the battery comes off it will shut down. So it may be that when it’s shutting down it’s because the battery has shifted slightly and isn’t touching the connectors or something. But, anyway, the point is that I need a new phone. So we went to the Sprint store today to look at phones. The ones I liked were almost $300. Back when I got the phone I have, it was only $150. The Sprint store only had 1 phone that was that cheap, and it wasn’t a very good phone. So we went to CompUSA and Best Buy to compare. At Best Buy, we discovered that comparable Cingular phones were quite a bit cheaper than their Sprint counterparts. So we went to the mall to look at all the other different cell phones and their relative prices and service plans. Looking at phones is annoying. The places all like to list the prices if you get their stupid 2-year serivce plan, so it’s hard to tell what the actual phone prices are like. Plus, the people are all desperately trying to get you to buy their phones, so every time you walk up to a kiosk or into a store they start hovering around you like annoying little insects that you want to swat away. It makes it difficult to just look at the phones by yourself. So here’s the deal: I could get a Sprint phone for a lot of money. Or we could switch to a different company, and we could both get phones for less than the price of 1 phone for me, plus get lower monthly payments. We’re thinking we’re going to get Cingular, since they seem to have good national coverage (they are the largest provider in the country, after all), it would be cheaper than our current plan by about $5 a month, and they have some nice phones that do not cost $300 apiece. Does anyone who reads my blog have Cingular/AT&T? One funny thing about the phone seller people: they love to ask you who your current provider is and how many minutes you have. When we tell them that we have only 500 minutes between us they stare at us in shock and horror, as if this is the most traumatic thing they’ve ever heard of. I don’t think people believe us when we tell them that we don’t ever use up all our minutes. I think they have a hard time comprehending how little we actually talk on the phone. Of course, any new plan will most likely have free calling between our phones and large numbers of (or unlimited) night and weekend minutes. So, then we’d use even less of our minutes than we do now.

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So I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair. I’ve sort of always thought about it off and on, because long hair has various problems, such as requiring lots of shampoo and time. But most relevantly, it’s very heavy, and gives me neck problems. Not that long ago, I somehow managed to wrench my neck one day while washing my hair and I couldn’t turn my head all morning without a lot of pain. It was really annoying, because, as it turns out, I turn my head all the time without even really thinking about it. I’ve never hurt my neck that badly at any other point, but I still do have neck pain of some sort on a regular basis, and sometimes it causes headaches, too. Anyway, it’s annoying, and would be greatly alleviated by cutting off my braid. The problem is, I like my braid, and if I cut it off I can’t just get it back. It would take many years to get a decent braid back. So I’m a bit leery of cutting my hair off because I would be really unhappy if I ended up with a haircut I didn’t like. Dan’s suggestion was that I could talk to a stylist and they would know what sorts of things I could do with my hair and I could see if I liked any of them. But, even so, I would probably still worry that I’d end up with like a big ugly poof of hair on my head and I wouldn’t be able to fix it. Basically, I would just have to hope that the stylist knew enough not to mess it all up (which I would hope would be the case, given that it’s their profession) and actually paid attention to what I liked (again, which one would hope they would do.) If I do cut my hair, I think I might go for something like this. Any comments, suggestions?

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