We're going to the Lake County Captains game tonight. They're the low class A affiliate of the Indians. Every Friday and Saturday they have fireworks nights, so it should be fun.

A friend of ours is the corporate sales manager there and he gets 8 free tickets to each and every game. On top of free seats tonight, we also get free parking. I think he also gets a food allowance per game, but sadly I think it's only about $10. Not the $800 that would be preferred.

Lindsay bought me a pressure washer for my birthday. I'm really looking forward to using it tonight to wash my car. It's SO dirty now. Covered in pollen and bird poop... poor car.

Matt aka Mookie is coming to town today. Should be a good time. It'll be nice to see him on his worldwind tour of America because heading back to China.

So over the weekend there were three movies I wanted to see, in this order:

Iron Man
Indiana Jones
Chronicles of Narnia

We went to see Narnia. What follows are some spoilers, so don't read if you don't want to.

It wasn't nearly as good as the first one. I have huge problems with the storyline, or lack thereof. I think the movie could've used another 30 minutes or so to give some sort of reasoning as to why they'd go fight with Prince Caspian to restore his claim to the throne. Granted, we missed about the first 3 minutes of the movie, so maybe something really insightful happened then, but I doubt it. We arrived shortly before news of Miraz's son was proclaimed by the professor. It seemed like this movie was all about the battle, but no thought was provided as to why they'd so willingly go to battle. The dwarf Narnian could've been used as a plot point and could've explained more thoroughly what was going on, but they chose not to do that.

The best part of the movie was the one on won fight of the kings. Everything else was kind of meh. I disliked the blatant Lord of the Rings ripoff with the attacking trees. Bleh.

I give it a 4 out of 10.

Happy birthday to me.

We're back from South Carolina and it finally got warm here in Cleveland while we were gone. It's supposed to be in the 60's or 70's all week.
Hooray.

I got a birthday card last night (my birthday is Monday by the way, for those sending gifts). On the front of the card it had a caricature of Hillary Clinton sitting behind a sign that said President Hillary Clinton.

On the inside of the card it said "There are worse things than turning a year older."

How true. Seeing her beady little caricature eyes staring back at me filled me with rage. Everything was made better though when I opened my gift and it was Mario Kart for the Wii. Yippee!

You know what I'm tired of hearing? "Oil prices rise to new record on supply worries."

You know why I'm tired of hearing that? Because there are no freaking supply worries. Supply has been as steady as ever. There are no disruptions anywhere. The headline really should read "Oil prices rise because they can and there's nothing you can do about it so just bend over and take it." Yes there are artificial constraints on supply, but existing supply is not going anywhere.

There's a whole confluence of issues driving prices higher. Among them include price caps in China. Essentially that means that the Chinese (you know, those driving demand supposedly) don't actually pay what it really costs for oil. Their government subsidizes it. China also has windfall taxes when suppliers there sell oil above $40 per barrel. That means that the suppliers have no incentive to increase their supply. Thus China is artificially inflating the prices that we pay because they're constraining their own suppliers.

Another is that the oil companies are recording huge profits but are not using them on new development. Instead they're returning that money to the shareholders. In general that's a pretty good idea, but they're doing it way too much. Instead of returning $30 Billion in profits to the shareholders, how about using $20 Billion of that to build a new refinery? You know what that would do? Give us more supply and them more profit. Instead of that, the oil companies themselves are now constraining supply. Effectively, the oil companies are living it up right now and will be paying for it later. Sounds just like our government and the typical consumer. Let's spend all of our money now and worry about how we'll buy food next month later.

We beat Super Mario Galaxy tonight. Now we just have 14 more stars to get. We've been playing it periodically for a while and both have enjoyed it. Lindsays job is not quite as difficult as mine, but it's nice that we can both play at the same time.

Next up we'll probably play through it again as Luigi. Actually, Lindsay said she'd play through it again as Luigi. My next game is Legend of Zelda. I've played it for about an hour even though I've owned it for a year.

Now that I think of it, I've got about 4 games that I've owned for a while that I've never played... Adulthood. It stinks.

So the NFL, the cash cow of all sports leagues, claim that every owner is losing money.

Sure they are.

They're losing money because they're only getting $21.4 Billion per year in TV contracts. That means each of the 32 owners only gets $668,750,000. From TV alone. Before they sell a ticket, or a hot dog, or a t-shirt. How can they feed their kids?

If the owners can manage to lose money when their payrolls are about $100 million and they're getting almost 7 times that amount just from TV, then something tells me they're really bad business men. Or they're lying. *GASP* The NFL? Lie? Sacrilegious! Everyone loves the NFL. They'd never do anything to hurt us. I can sleep soundly at night knowing that the NFL is protecting my house from burglars.

Give me a break. The NFL is full of crap and if the owners want to kill their golden goose then I can only hope that no one ever watches a game again.

So now that the Cavs are again out of the playoffs, what do they need to do in order to get to the promised land?

Do they need new players? Maybe, but let's start with other types of changes.

First they need to run the offense through the point guard and not through LeBron James. When LeBron brings the ball up the court then the rest of the team just stands around and doesn't know what to do. When the point guard brings it up, suddenly the team springs to life and there's movement.

Second, they need to practice their free throws. If they could hit 80% instead of 70% they'd average 4 more points per game. That's huge, and is easy enough to do.

Third, LeBron needs to realize the type of player that he is. He's the guy that needs to attack, attack, attack. He needs to go hard to the rim. Too often he settles for fall away jumpers and out of control three pointers. Someone with his kind of physical abilities needs to be going to the hoop about 15 times per game.

Finally, they need to address the roster. They have adequate depth, but they don't have a guy that can take a double team and take some pressure off of LeBron.

Look at yesterday's game. LeBron scored 44 points, but what do you remember? You remember the misses. The bad three pointer at the end of the game. The missed layup. The missed free throws. The failure to stop the Celtics at critical times.

It's unfortunate too because LeBron hit 50% of his shots, but you don't remember that. You remember the misses early in the series and not the makes at the end of the series.

We're going to one of our favorite pizza places tonight... Angelo's in Lakewood.

The pizza is great. Whenever we go to the west side (west siiiiiiiiiiiiide) of Cleveland we eat there. I'm really looking forward to it.

We're heading to that side of town to renew the leases for the tenants living in Lindsay's old house. It's a duplex and up and down are both renewing, so that was a nice load off of our mind. They take really good care of the place too so we're happy that they're staying.

Hopefully the Cavs don't spoil the night. Come on! Play a whole game. I want to enjoy my pizza!

The Cavs blew it last night, but the Indians pitchers are playing out of their mind. Today the Indians pitcher gave up an unearned run. It was the first run of any kind that a starter had given up in over 5 games.

Now the offense just needs to get on track and it appears that the team could live up to their potential. Travis Hafner is struggling mightily. Sizemore has been solid. Jhonny Peralta needs to hit better. David Delucci has been a pleasant surprise and may have locked up a starting spot in left field. Victor Martinez has hitting well, but where has his power gone?

Of course, the pitchers aren't going to go throughout the remainder of the season with an ERA of 1.0. It just seems like they've turned a corner. Hopefully the Tigers continue to struggle and the Indians can run away with the division. It usually doesn't work out that way for the Tribe, but we'll see...

Cavs have a big lead. Check.

LeBron off to a good start. Check.

Cavs blow a big lead. Check.

Rarely are they able to put together a complete game. They have no idea how to step on a teams throat when they have them down. How can you have a 14 point lead and end up losing by 20? Granted, they're only down 12 (84-72) as I write this, but it's just a little prediction of mine.

Ah... I feel refreshed. I finally got a bunch of sleep that I've been missing. Yes, It's 5:41 AM, but I've already been up for about a hour. I guess that's what happens when you go to bed at 7:00 PM.

One of the most exciting nights of my life is about to conclude...

I got home from work and had some cereal for dinner -- it was awesome.

After "dinner" I helped Lindsay mulch some trees.

I've kept my eyes open for long enough now... it's almost 7:00 and I'm going to bed.

So much to say. So little motivation to say it.

Here's a quick run down of thoughts...

The Indians are playing like poop and are only a game out. That's good.

The Cavs finally put together a complete game and whipped the Celtics. LeBron is not shooting well though. That's bad.

We transplanted the trees that were along the fence line to be along the driveway. That will help hide our neighbors unkempt lawn. That's good.

We saw Juno over the weekend. It has some laugh out loud moments and overall was pretty good. I saw Cars too. It was also pretty good.

Max is on two more pills. If there is a pill out there for a disease \ infection \ allergy, then Max is on it. I'm beginning to think that the best option out there is to have the worlds first bubble dog.

The Cavs blew it big time last night. They had the perfect opportunity to go up 1-0 on the Celtics in the East Semi's. Even though they lost, it's possible to take some positive things away from it. They stayed close, and still could've pulled it out in the end, with LeBron having one of the worst games of his career. If he can get back on a more normal track, they could win. The down side of that though is that they're not going to be able to hold Ray Allen scoreless again and Paul Pierce to another game like the had.

So the question is this: will LeBron's increase more than offset Pierce's and Allen's increases? I'm not so sure, but that's why they play the games.

Our stock (PCP) was up over $11 per share today at some point. It finished up $8.20. I'll take it.

It's close to where it needs to be for us to sell again, and let me tell you, that would be great.

How great? Well, I'd finally be able to build Palm Tim (kind of like this) on Lake Erie.

The Indians have an off day today. At this point in the season they were supposed to be rolling along. This reminds me of 2005 all over again. They're digging themselves a hole and then they'll make a mad dash to get out of it, only to falter at the end. Whenever they have high expectations they seem to collapse under the weight of them.

But, you might say, they're only a couple of games out of first. That's true, but they're playing like poop. Inconsistent poop at that.

The only reason they're within striking distance still is because of how poorly the Tigers have played. I don't expect that to continue all year. The only way the Indians will make the playoffs this year is to win their division. Fortunately for them, no AL Central team seems to want to start to run away with it. It's only a matter of time before that happens though.

So the Cavs wrapped up their series with the Wiz. It wasn't even close in the clincher.

More interestingly though is the Hawks - Celtics game that's got 8.7 seconds left in the 4th quarter at this point. The Hawks, amazingly enough, are up by 2 on the team that won the most games of any team in the NBA this year. Should the Hawks push to a game 7, it's good new for the Cavs. Given a game 7 in this series, the Cavs will have a few extra days of rest that are critical at this point in the season.

Let's see what happens.

Bibby misses 1 of 2 foul shots, so now the Hawks are up by 3. What the freak? Raging Rajon Rondo just basically dribbled out the clock. Good move. He had 10 seconds and the only thing he could do was put up a 25 footer. Nice

Second straight inning for the Indians with the bases loaded and one out.

Let's see what happens here. Two strike outs in the bottom of the ninth was last inning. Now, Franklin Gutierrez is up.

I predict a weak blooper or a double play. A little pessimistic I suppose.

We'll see as I report "live."

Strike 1.

Swing and a miss, strike 2.

Weak sissy swing. Of course.

Sit down.

Here comes Asdrubal Cabrera.

Yippee! Their first hit of the home stand with runners in scoring position.

Indians win it. Hallelujah.



Now as you know we were in Tampa last weekend, but I never posted any pictures. I've got a few choice ones... I'll post more from the carnival later.

Here's a panorama from our seats. If you click on it, it's much bigger. That's what she said.








Here's me and Ted Williams (yes, they have the Ted Williams museum in Tampa, where they happen to love their Red Sox.) You may have noticed that Ted just got done fishing...