So August is set to be quite the month for me, personally.

 

Milestone 1: 8/12/2006 (16 days away): The first preseason game at Cardinals Stadium. Will the Cards win? Who cares! It's a chance to see the stadium, cheer for whoever is playing, and enjoy the cool environment on a hot, summer day.

 

Milestone 2: 8/19/2006 (23 days away): The guided tour of the stadium. Tours are free but require a ticket (available for free from www.ticketmaster.com). This is my chance to see all the parts of the stadium that I won't see at the game.

 

Milestone 3: 8/20-8/26/2006 (24 days away): The American Poolplayers National Team Championships for 8-Ball at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas include our team from Phoenix, AZ. We intend to win the $25,000 prize.

 

Milestone 4: 8/31/2006 (35 days away): The final preseason game for the Cardinals at Cardinals Stadium against the Broncos. Again, not a barn burner since it's preseason, but what a way to close out the preseason. Go Cards!

So two consecutive entries about football. I'm allowed. It isn't as if anyone will ever read this.

 

Just 18 more days until the first preseason game at Cardinals Stadium. As of now, only two games remain to be sold out. As expected, the preseason closer against the Broncos has generated less interest because a) it's preseason, and b) the Broncos will be coming during the regular season, too. The game on 11/19 against the Detroit Lions has not sold out yet either.

 

With all but one draft pick signed (Leinart will sign within the first few days of camp), things are only looking up for my Cardinals. It's time to prove it to the world now.

My season tickets arrived in the mail yesterday. This fall, I'll be one of over 63,000 fans packing Cardinals Stadium in Glendale to watch the Arizona Cardinals shock the NFL with their ability to beat teams that had already circled the game as a winnable game on their schedule.

 

Prices went up this year. Last year I paid $61.20 per game for 9 games, or $550.80 for the entire season (in fairness, had one game not been played in Mexico City, that total would have been $612.00). Add in parking charges (shared by my father and me), and the annual cost at last year's rate was $637.00. This year's rate raises that number to $792.50 for exactly the same position on the field.

 

Hey, I'm not saying the experience will be the same since I know Cardinals Stadium is way better than Sun Devil Stadium, but a 24.4% increase is substantial. And with them selling out the stadium this year, increases next year seem to be a sure thing.

 

Just win, and I'll forget everything else.

My daughter is 16 now, and she has a life of her own separate from Mom and Dad. This last weekend, I didn't get to see her until Sunday evening when I decided that going to a movie would be a fun outing.

 

Problem 1: The woman in the seat behind me chose to use my chair (one that rocks back and forth) as her foot rest.

 

Problem 2: In the row behind us and four seats over, a child was talking loudly through much of the movie.

 

Problem 3: Some idiot decided to entertain the audience with a laser pointer.

 

Problem 4: I chose "My Super Ex-Girlfriend."

 

I take full responsibility for one of those errors. The previews looked so fun. It had Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman, it played on the Superman myth, and it introduced the notion of a neurotic jilted lover who could make life hell for the ex-boyfriend. What could go wrong? It misses slightly in several places (though Wanda Sykes, when she appeared, was fantastic), and the sum total of those misses just makes the movie less than it could be. While it was certainly not as bad as Serving Sara, that movie came to mind afterward as another example of a movie with an interesting premise that just kept taking wrong turns where the right turns seemed rather obvious to me. In the end, all of the best parts of the movie are contained in the previews. Hold on this one until it hits DVD.

 

Oh, well. Between this and "Nacho Libre," I'll now have an even tougher time convincing my daughter that I have good taste in movies.

I shoot pool. I'm not great, but I'm not awful either. I understand strategies and can visualize the portions of the game which use an understanding of physics.

 

Anyway, every Thursday evening, I shoot pool with a team I've been on for three years. Prior to joining the league, my pool experience was the occasional game against my dad. I was very bad. Even after joining the league, my skills did not improve rapidly. While I made an effort to attend every week, and while I'm competitive enough to always want to win, it was never important enough that I got upset by a loss. We'd occasionally make it to a citywide tournament, but we usually lost in the third or fourth round, and that was it.

 

Then came the 9-Ball Citywide in 2005. Our team enjoyed an unusual confluence of incorrectly set skill levels. We had a player rated as a 2 who really shot like a 3. We had two people rated at 4 when, in truth, they were 5 or 6. And I was properly rated as a 3. Our low ratings gave us a handicap advantage no other team in the county could match. We won the tournament and entry into the national tournament in Las Vegas. Success hooked me.

 

At the national tournament, we did reasonably well (of 283 teams, we finished in a 32 way tie for 33rd place). It was a wonderful experience, and I decided to become the best player I was capable of becoming.

 

In the year since, I have studied, practiced and prepared for the next round of tournaments. And while our 9-Ball team did not qualify, our 8-Ball team has, yet again, made it to the national tournament in Las Vegas. I'm pumped, and I intend to blow apart my competition.

 

So what does all of this have to do with commitment? Our team is breaking up. Last year's team had seven members. Of those seven, one moved to Tucson several months ago. Around the same time, we added a player who had originally started on another team from another night but which had two players in common with our team. Unfortunately, with the arrival of the summer session, that team could no longer play on that night and joined our league. As a result, all three common players left to be on the other team. That left only four members on our team, and since one of those was now unable to come on Thursday nights (our league night) for an extended period, we were down to three. As a final straw, one additional player could not attend through most of the summer due to her involvement with fire fighting crews on wildfires throughout Arizona.

 

With only two players on our team, we needed to expand quickly. But while we've expanded, the players who have come in have not committed to coming on a regular basis. Since the start of the summer session, 13 different players have played for our team. Of those, two are the same players who have difficulty showing up, six have left and won't return, and one more will leave at the end of the session.

 

I'm rapidly realizing that one of the things that made the team so successful is the consistent attendance by the members. I'm addicted to going to Vegas. I sure hope we find a lineup that can last a while.

I already have a blog that I've posted to on quite a number of occasions. But I've decided that I like the look and feel of this site a bit better.

 

First, you've got that background of the road ahead (on the chance that my background changes in the future, ith was a road splitting a green field with a blue sky only occasionally dotted by clouds). Second, the blog is only one portion of the overall space while photo albums and other things seem to provide quite the complete page. I almost wish I didn't have my own domain now.

 

And the formatting features for this blogging stuff seem to be even better than those of blogger.com. We'll see if I keep this up.

Everyone seems to want to have blog space (better advertising for them). I may, at some point, use this space for that purpose, but until then, I currently maintain two blogs over at Blogger. They are Arizona Cardinals Fan and Lloydian. Come enjoy my liberal beliefs and follow the oldest professional football team still in existence.