fantasy football noob week 3

my record is now 1-2. i lost pretty bad this time around. next time remind me to save changes when i make a lineup change. it's not good to realize at 7pm that the change you *thought* you made at 10 am didn't really happen, and as a result, your consistently unproductive receiver continued to be consistent in his lack of productivity and isn't on the bench where he belongs and where you swear you put him that morning. i meant to put in devery henderson, since the saints are more than overdue for their offense to show up, and, hey, he couldn't do any worse that that lump i have in currently. didn't help that steve smith had a bum week and how could carson palmer repeat what he did last week. addai had a solid performance, as usual, but that was about it. plus my opponent this week had randy moss, whom i had the option to keep at the beginning of the year, but sadly didn't. who'd have known he would be having a monster start to this season. well i guess if you think about it, he finally has a star qb throwing to him. his decline in recent years must have had more to do with his surroundings than age or losing his touch. ah well, there's always next week. even if devery henderson has a fantastic night tonight, i don't think it would matter. he'd need to score over 36 fantasy points to have overcome my margin of loss. not likely. i can't feel too bad even if he does. at least i didn't bench kevin curtis like heath's opponent did...

and now just for entertainment's sake, a completely real (and unfortunate) ad featuring carson palmer, last week's hero... this'll teach him to give me less than 20 points!

fantasy football noob week 2

week 2 went much much better than week 1. i won my matchup, but it took a phenomenal week to do it. many thanks to the fella below (carson palmer) who threw for six touchdowns and 400 yards. also big props to steve smith's 3 touchdowns and bunches of yards. heath didn't fare as well, losing to the league leader (and now only undefeated team). i'm still working on learning more about who to play when and trying to pick up some good backups for my bye weeks. i don't expect a particularly strong showing since this is my first season, but my core of keepers should keep me from being totally embarrassed week to week.

too cute

i know a lot of people out there hate when people put clothes on dogs, but this is pretty cute. make.com featured a way to make a dog sweater out of a sock. obviously this is only going to work on little dogs, like yorkies or something else teensy. enjoy!


disclaimer: i have to admit that the dog doesn't look thrilled in that picture, so i wouldn't subject a dog to this unless they liked it. mostly, i thought it was clever to think of making it out of a sock.

drugs are scary

i came across this quiz this morning. see if you can match up the side effect to the prescription medication. i only got 5/10.

ugh

on my drive to work this morning, as i was going through an intersection, i saw a guy stopped at the cross street drop a piece of paper out his window. sir, the world is not your trashcan. how people can have such disregard for their world is beyond me. apparently it was just too inconvenient to take it to a garbage can later. that slip of paper had to be out of his car. now. it was obviously not accidental, and he did it as casually as if he were dropping it into a wastebasket. this was what bothered me the most, that it didn't even appear to cross his mind that it might be wrong to do this.

i admit i'm not as good to the environment as i should be. i probably produce more carbon emissions with my commute and generate more garbage with how i live than is necessary, but at least i put trash where it belongs. it's been made clear in a number of ways that the world is hurting and that we need to take better care of it. at this point, people should be making efforts to be more "green" (and a lot of them are). yet, i consistently see people like this that won't even contribute at a basic level by not littering. these people need a swift kick, and to be put on litter picking up duty.

rant over.

fantasy football noob week 1

so, i am playing fantasy football for the first time this year. heath invited me to play in a "keeper" league he is in. they had some drop outs from last year, so i took one of the open spots. we all pitch in $20, and the winners of the regular season and playoffs get prize money at the end of the season.

now, i already liked watching football, but i've only been watching it sporadically for the last few years, and i have very limited knowledge about the players and teams. i'm trying to learn as much as i can. thankfully, i'm a fast learner and wasn't completely boneheaded my first week. my biggest mistake was not playing marshawn lynch. that whole "don't start a rookie in week 1" advice wasn't so helpful this time around. this week i was matched up against heath (of course), and thing were looking good after thursday night's game. however, the rest of my players failed to perform well on sunday, and heath had tony romo, who had the game of his life and put up 40 fantasy points. cuh-raz-ay. i don't recall what the final score was, but it wasn't pretty. hopefully next week, i get a better performance out of my guys. i have some great players, and some of them did really well this week. joseph addai, steve smith, and carson palmer are my stars, and i should be able to count on fairly consistent performances out of them week to week. the rest of my players were under their predictions. part of what i need to keep a better eye on is how the defenses are on the teams my players are playing against. also not helping was that this week was the one that my defense (baltimore) happened to be playing against my quarterback's team (cincinnati). last night i was very torn on who to cheer for.

being on a fantasy football league totally changes the way i watch the games now. i get torn because i'll have a guys on both teams that are playing eachother, so i end up rooting for the individual players rather than a team in general. it's pretty fun. we'll see how i do this week. so far, i'm predicted to lose by about 10, but heath was projected to lose to me by about that much, so you can't put too much stock in those numbers.

healthy eating

saw this on a blog today. i've realized that i'm not feeding my body as well as i should be, which is probably contributing to me having less energy and just feeling kind of blah. heath and i have both said that we want to start being healthier. the tips below were timely and were good enough that i wanted to share them. some of them are no brainers, but they are all useful. also, i'm going to start tracking my meals on fitday.com. that should help keep me honest about my calories and exercise and everything!

1. Start thinking in terms of ‘nutrient density.’ Huh? What does that even mean? It means you’ve gotta start thinking proportionally. Choose foods that give you the most nutrients per calorie. Like skim milk instead of ice cream for calcium. An orange instead of orange juice for fiber. (Apparently, juices aren’t even that good for us. It’s way better just to eat the actual fruit and have a glass of water. Who knew?) A can of tuna instead of beef for protein. The goal is always to get more nutrients for the same amount of calories. For me, this way of thinking was revolutionary.

2. Get salad dressing on the side. I almost fell out of my chair when the professor announced that the number one source of fat in a woman’s diet was salad dressing. All the naïve women dieters think, ‘oh I’ll just have a salad,” without analyzing what actually goes into to that yummy mixture of mesculan greens.

3. Diet soda is baaaad. It can’t be rationalized. Diet soda drinkers had the same amount of diabetes as people who drank regular soda. The fake sweetness in diet soda messes with your palate, and your body reacts to it as if it were real sugar anyway. Diet sodas have also been proven to make you crave more sweets. They also limit you from getting good, healthy sugars. Like how many of us have ever downed a Diet Coke and then craved the nutritious sugary goodness of an apple? Yeah, it’s never happened. Instead, we crave salty chips or fries.

4. Fiber is fabulous, but not without water. I pop fiber pills and invest in whole-wheat products all the time. We all know fiber is invaluable to our digestive system. What I never knew though is that fiber can’t be digested by itself. You need to be super hydrated in order for it to work. So start downing water.

5. Dried fruit is not necessarily our friend. Grapes and raisins have the same amount of calories, but raisins contain no water, and therefore aren’t as filling. So you eat way more raisins than you would grapes, consuming perhaps twice the amount of calories, while grapes would have made you full ten minutes ago. Dried fruits also tend to be artificially sweetened (more bad news).

6. Occasionally indulge in the unhealthy things you like rather than eating the ‘low fat’ equivalent. I wanted to kiss my nutritionist professor on the mouth when she announced that if you’re obsessed with Ben and Jerry’s, it’s A-okay to enjoy a small portion every once in awhile. A large, low fat tub of frozen yogurt won’t be as satisfying, usually resulting in eating a lot more of it. And eating more of something that’s theoretically ‘low fat’ isn’t necessarily the best route. She pointed out many eaters view a ‘low fat’ label as an excuse to over-indulge. Most of these ‘low fat’ items aren’t that good for us either!

labor day weekend / six month-iversary

heath and i had a very eventful labor day weekend. ironically, as outdoorsy as we typically are, we were very urban this time around.

friday night after work, we decided to walk up to downtown evanston for sushi at koi, where i had sake for the first time. i had it cold, but i think i would like it better hot. it was definitely strong, and they give you plenty of it. the food was good, as was expected, and we happened to be seated in the same spot as we were last time we went there. after dinner, we wandered up to the movie theater to catch superbad, since we had heard it was incredibly funny. it was. it was pretty dirty at times, but was well done and had a nice ending. after the movie, we were wandering back home, and decided to stop at nevin's pub to have a beer (shandy for me -- my new favorite incognito girly drink) and play some darts. heath beat me three (?) times in a row at cricket, but at least i hung in there, making it a close game every time.

saturday, we got up and went to the farmer's market, then came home and did a lot more picking up and unpacking around the apartment. yes, still unpacking. we made a ton of progress this weekend, and are getting down to the last few things. the place is starting to look more like a home and less like a box depository.

in the afternoon, we watched the illini football game (more on that in a later post) and i made eggplant parmesan with some of the stuff we got at the farmer's market. we had a nice dinner with a bottle of gewurztraminer from round barn winery in michigan. after dinner, heath gave me a gift to mark us being together for six months. it's a really lovely silver necklace from tiffany & co (somewhere i never thought i'd ever own anything from). you can see it in the picture i posted below. he also had planned something special for sunday and monday, but that was still a surprise. (as a side note, i had given him an authentic ron santo cubs jersey the wednesday before when we went to see the cubs lose to the brewers.)

sunday morning, we packed up and hopped on the purple line to head into chicago. we got off at grand, and dropped our bags off at a hotel. we got some lunch at su casa, a mexican place in the area, before walking south along michigan avenue. we got on the trolley (it was PACKED), and
took that down to the museum campus. through work, heath has a membership to the field museum, and neither of us had been there in quite a while, so we headed there. it sounds dorky, but it was a lot of fun. i learned a lot about how much has changed regarding what scientists know about dinosaurs since i was a kid. they also have redone large portions of their permanent exhibits, which were a lot of fun to look at. the museum closed at 5, so they kicked us out. we saw the line for the trolley and felt sick. we were about to take a cab, then realized we could just slum it and take the bus ;). it was a good choice, since it was air conditioned, and less crowded than the taxi (totally worth $1.75). however, as it chugged up state street, we came to a stop, the lights went out, and the driver hopped off and started walking around the bus. weird. also, there was some beeping. weird. turns out it was a fire alarm. what?! shouldn't the bus driver have told us to get off the bus? oh well, there was no fire, but we got off and walked the rest of the way back to the hotel, which was fine because it was only a few blocks. the weather was great. we were wishing we had worn shorts instead of jeans all day, but it was alright. the river and the lake were beautiful shades of green and blue, respectively. :P we got back to the hotel and went down to the pool and spa and hung out there for a while. it was very relaxing and a lot of fun. then we headed back to the room to shower and get ready for dinner.

we got pretty dressed up and walked to the hancock building to eat at the signature room, which is on the 95th floor. it was already dark, so the view was amazing. we were seated by the window, but the view was partially obscured by one of the big black cross beams. it was still
really cool, though. dinner was fantastic. heath had several lobsters in various formats and i had a filet mignon that seriously melted in my mouth. overall a very romantic and relaxing dinner. after dinner, we considered going up to the lounge (on the 96th floor), but decided to go walk around and find somewhere else to hang out, since that lounge can get kind of snobby and was likely beyond packed at that point.

we walked down the streets, trying to figure out where to go to have a drink or two, and ended up coming across the redhead piano bar. fortunately we were dressed up, so they let us in (telling us how great we looked on the way in - how fun is that?!). we found a small table right away and listened to the pianist go through billy joel, elton john, coldplay, johnny cash, and all sorts of songs. we had a couple of drinks, people watched, and had a great time.

monday morning, we slept in since we were exhausted. by the time we checked out, it was pretty much lunchtime, so we tried to figure out where to eat. we settled on espn zone since it was sort of on the way back to the train and would be pretty fun. we had a bite to eat and then played some of the arcade games: bowling, air hockey, basketball, that old school hockey game with the plastic puck in the plexi dome (you know the one i mean), various racing games, and whatever else looked fun. it was definitely a good place to stop to just goof off and have fun.

the train ride home took forever, since somebody had apparently jumped on the tracks south of the station we were at. trains were mega delayed. it was hot and stuffy in the underground station, and was getting more and more crowded by the minute since there was a cubs game that was going to start in about an hour. fortunately, we had our suitcases to use as chairs and i had a couple magazines. that helped take the pain out of the wait. we let the lemmings cram themselves onto the first two trains that came into the station, knowing that due to the delay and backup, there would likely be a bunch of trains all in a row. we got on the third train and tucked ourselves into the end seats in one of the cars, where we could read in peace and our suitcases would be out of the way. once we finally got home, we rested and then did some more unpacking, making even more headway. it was a great weekend, despite the drama that sometimes accompanies public transit in chicago. it was really nice of heath to plan the little getaway for us.

next weekend: back to camping!