I received a phone call this morning from my sister. I thought, ok why is she calling me now? She told me that she found out from my brother, that our father had died. At first I was filled with sadness, but then mixed emotions of sadness and anger. She told me that my brother's girlfriend googled his name and found his obituary. My brother is taking it hard and my mom kind of knew. So a little background on this is that my parents got divorced when I was two. I saw my father throughout my childhood and early teen years. We lived with him for a year when I was in second grade. He eventually remarried and had another daughter. After his divorce he moved away. He never called and we never saw him. I will always remember on my 16th birthday, he called. He made no mention of my birthday or anything to that matter. I was crushed. I grew to hate him, but as the joke always go, for the person who hated him the most, I was always the one who ended up answering phone whenever he did call. I still remember when I hurt my knee really bad and ended up in the ER, he called my mom when he got the bill and told me I was faking it and that my mom took us to the doctor every time we got the sniffles. I asked him if he wanted to see my xrays. I don't really recall talking to him after that. He called once when I was in my 20s to tell my mom he had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Was I know supposed to care? She used to information to turn over to the state who was looking for him for being a deadbeat dad. He went as far as to leave the country to evade paying child support. We had talked about him here and there and over Christmas by brother and sister both said they would go to his funeral. I was shocked and confused. Did they have the same father? Was this the same man? He died on March 21, 2008. I looked at his obit online and was like, well it would have been nice if they would have at least spelt my name correctly. A link was provided to the funeral home that buried him, along with his guestbook. So I looked at it. It had a recent picture of him, which got me a little sad, but that didn't last long once I started reading his guestbook. All of these people had such great wonderful things to say about him. How he was the life of the party, funny, an all around great guy. WHAT?!?!? Where did it mention that he abandoned his six kids total? Where did it mention that he never paid child support? Where was all of that? I am so tempted to post a message myself, but my mom asked me not to. So now I am left sitting with mixed emotion...should I be sad, should I be mad, should I just not care? He died not knowing he was a grandfather. But ya know what, he died without being a "father" himself. I get sad when I think that my son will never have a grandfather, but then I think about how my brother grew up without a father.

Just a little note I wanted to leave. There is someone on this site that drives me bonkers. S/he is so fake that half the time I want to leave comments in his/her blog, but I resist. But lately s/he is getting worse. I'd think if you were going to lie about something, that you might want to read up on it a little, before posting something that is medically impossible. It's funny though, because I knew the blogs were coming and laughed at the fact that what s/he claims isn't possible yet. I think my best bet is to just stop tracking this person's blogs so I won't read anymore of their bs.

On another note, I think everyone should take a refresher glance at the submission guidelines, being as they are always updated. I have been having to reject so many submissions lately from people who are level 30+, who should really know better. It makes me wonder if they are submitting the same stuff to other guides and it's being accepted their, even though the submission guidelines say it shouldn't.

It seems that at the worst possible time, my computer decides to act up on me. My computer started running slow, so I rebooted it. Upon it restarting, five Internet explorer windows opened up and my virus scan blocked some malicious file trying to open. After that it was just a meltdown. Nothing would load and then the blue screen of death appeared and wouldn't go away. I tried to reload my windows, but that only allowed me to have partial use of my computer. I couldn't anything to load again and kept getting weird error messages. The guy at Best Buy told me I could format my hard drive, but it would still have problems because of the blue screen messages. So I just decided to suck it up and buy a whole new hard drive. I had to buy one two years ago and let me tell you they were about thirty dollars cheaper back than. So I had my Friday night filled with reloading all my programs and service packs. Not only did I have the computer issues to worry about, but my son's third birthday was on Saturday and his b-day party was on Sunday so I had all that to prepare for. Just when I thought I would have some down time, the neighbor calls and wants to send her boys over for me to watch for like the umpteen time. And to top it off, the older one just told me held back his puck this morning by pushing it back down. Hey thanks for sending me over your sick kids that feel like throwing up. Much appreciated!

The drag racing community suffered a horrible loss yesterday afternoon during the last round of qualifying in Englishtown, New Jersey. Scott Kalitta, who is a two time Funny Car Champion, was making his last pass when his Nitro Funny Car blew up going over 300 mph and was unable to stop after he hit the sand pit and hit a concrete pole and guardrail. Most drag racers have never seen a crash like this before. If the shut down area of the track would have been longer, he might have made it out with injuries, instead of death. News of his death was not officially released by the NHRA or the Associated Press for about two hours and until after his father who was present at the time of the crash was able to call Scott's wife and let her know what happened. The NHRA has had a rough couple of years lately. Last year in March of 2007, Eric Medlen died after going into severe tire shake after a test run. In 2004, the NHRA lost Darell Russell when his Top Fuel dragster when out of control. I still remember watching it live on tv when it happened. Fortunately when John Force was in a horrible crashed last year when his car came apart leaving his legs exposed, he survived. What will the NHRA learn for this accident. With Eric Medlen's crash, John Force racing spend millions of dollars to learn how to better protect their drivers by adding more to the roll cage and adding more padding. With John Force's crash, they learned how to better reinforce the chassis so it wouldn't break apart by the seat.

The race will go on, but Scott will be in our hearts. Scott is survived by his wife, two sons, and father.

In case some of you haven't noticed, some really popular guides have recently lost their editors. Either people are more ruthless than ever when it comes to reporting MIA editors, or the staff is out trolling for the MIAs. I know I reported someone MIA twice over a two month time, and it seemed that the staff was only retiring them from a guide or two a month. From the looks of it though, there are at least 200 + people guides not potentially editorless, if there wasn't another contributor over 40 CPs and 50 + popular tv shows who just lost their editor. I gained one of them, but did a lot of work to get it by fixing the cast lists and rewriting the summaries that were copied and pasted. There is going to be one real ticked off editor when they return from vacation to find out that even though they posted in their blog and on the editor's special circumstances thread, that they were still retired from all their guides. That's one person who really deserves to be able to get them back, because he/she did everything they were supposed to when reporting that they will be away.

On another note, if you watch the news lately in the US you see a lot about the flooding in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, but what they never mention is Wisconsin. The Fox river is so far over it's banks that several bridges and roads are impassable on major highways. Levees have been breaking all over. A huge man made lake in Wisconsin Dell, which drew huge crowds and events, is now gone. The dam didn't break, the lake just made it's own new path, leaving houses falling off their foundation and a lake completely gone. It's amazing to look at, but sad to think what's going to happen to the town now that one of it's man tourist attractions is now gone. The other day it took me 20 minutes to get around a detour of about 20 feet because I couldn't go over a bridge. It's nuts. Several counties have been declared disaster areas and are getting federal help now. I couldn't imagine. I did notice the other day that the house we use to live in, which was right next to a lake, now had water up to the door and most likely inside. Now with more rain coming (it's raining right now) who knows what will happen.