nette’s weblog

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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Apparently there actually are people who use segways. (Other than Disney World, which doesn’t really count because they have all sorts of strange things.) Anyway, the other day we were at Barnes and Noble and locked to the bike rack was this segway. So I guess not only does someone in town have one, but they also ride it to the bookstore. I thought it was cool. I think people thought I was weird for taking a picture of it.

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…you see an ad for “Fit and Fun” Care Bears. They’re like those singing and dancing kinds of toys except that they wear headbands and say things like “1, 2, 3… isn’t working out fun!” or whatever. And the kids are supposed to exercise with the Care Bears. Can’t people just give their kids a ball and send them outside? Or give them less junk food?

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Yes, that’s right. Today we are indeed rooting for Michigan State. Since we don’t play Wisconsin this year we need someone else to beat them in order to go to the Rose Bowl. Right now the Spartans are up 42 to 14, so I really doubt Wisconsin is going to make a comeback. (Although anything is possible.) If this score holds up, all we need to do is beat Ohio State next week to be Big Ten champs.

Update: State won 49-14. So we’re guaranteed at least a shared Big Ten championship.

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Okay, I changed the theme to one I like better. However, it won’t work if you’re getting to the blog from the fprintf.net link. Dan changed it to gryniewicz.com. So if you want the themes to work, change your bookmark to this blog to be www.gryniewicz.com/nette/blog. If you don’t like the theme I picked you can use a different one. Over on the side if you scroll down a little bit there’s a dropdown box labeled “style”. Those are all the styles you can use for my blog.

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As you can see we switched to a new blog thing. This should hopefully cut down on the number of spam comments we get. Right now it looks kind of blah, but there are themes and stuff, so maybe I’ll make it look better. If the theme thing works, that is.

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Well, that was quite a game. We had a bunch of Spartans near us, which was kind of annoying during most of the game, since they were ahead so much. When we were down by 17 with 8 minutes or so left the people next to us left. I bet they’re sorry about that now. Although, admittedly, it was really cold. It was so hot when the game started, so we didn’t have coats and we were freezing. But then after we started scoring we got to cheer and jump up and down and that helped keep us warm. For those of you who don’t know what happened, we kicked a field goal to cut their lead to 14. Then we did an onside kick because there were only 6 minutes and something left and we still needed 2 scores. The ball bounced off a State guy and we recovered it. Then we quickly scored with a long pass to Edwards. (Someone in the student section had a Kerry/Edwards sign that they’d changed to say “Braylon Edwards”. It was pretty funny.) After that there were still 6 minutes, so we kicked it away. Our defense held and we scored again and ultimately went to overtime tied 27-27. Because of the way the wind was blowing, all the overtime took place in the endzone down by us (we were in the section behind the band). The first overtime we both got field goals, the second one we both got touchdowns. In the third overtime we got a touchdown and then made the 2-point conversion (once you reach the 3rd overtime you have to go for 2). I was thinking it would probably come down to whether they could make a 2-point conversion too, but our defense was able to hold them and their 4th down play fell incomplete. For whatever reason the stupid ESPN halftime show during whatever game this is that’s on now didn’t show highlights of the Michigan game. They said to tune in to their college gameday show or whatever at midnight. I think we’ll just wait and watch the highlights on Michigan Replay.

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My brother finally started a blog. This leaves Diana as the only one in the family without one. (Okay, well, Morgan doesn’t have a blog, either, but since she can’t read or write yet it doesn’t really count.) So, hurry up, Diana, make a blog! Jenny now says she wants a website, too, so maybe it won’t be long until everyone in the family has a website. I don’t really have a website. The gryniewicz.com website (or fprintf.net) is mine and Dan’s, but I don’t do anything to it and I didn’t actually do any of the work or anything. I think my blog is good enough. Not that I ever write in it.

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