I haven't blogged in awhile, so I thought I'd post a quick update.

My health is still up and down, but I have seen recent improvements. I've managed to stay out of the hospital for this whole summer, which is really good news for me.

I'm buying a house. It's scary, but definitely the right time financially.

School starts back in two weeks. As always things will be busy. Especially as I try to move at the same time.

As always, I appreciate any help with any of my guides. So feel free to submit info as you find it.

B

A lot of you may have noticed my decreased presence here at TV.com. While I'm not ready to give up my editorships, I have not been spending as much time here. 1) work's been crazy.
2)My health has been steadily decreasing, and frankly I don't have the energy to fight the system to submit certain things. I've been hospitalized 6 times since September, had 13 blood transfusions, and have undergone numerous tests. Sometimes I just want to watch TV, not analyze it.
3)A lot of the users that I enjoyed the most on this site have also decreased the amount of time here.
4)The Sports forum, where I spent a lot of my time, has been on lockdown lately. Our Yahoo fantasy league was shut down. What a dissappointment by TPTB. This was all inclusive and a lot of fun. Suddenly, we can't play anymore. *sigh*

I'm still checking my queue, but I've fallen behind on some of the regular information I used to submit. Hopefully, I'll get a second wind. Otherwise, I may retire. If retirment wasn't permanant, if I could take a medical break, I might consider it. But I have put a lot of hard work into all of my guides, and I'm not quite ready to let go yet. Still, I'm heading that way. My guess is that if I do retire, someone else will pick up my slack--that's the way of the world.

High School Football in Texas is king. and this year my high school (where I teach) was almost at the top of the heap. We competed in the State semi-finals on Saturday. Had we won, we would have been playing for the state championship at reliant Stadium in Houston. Unfortunately, we lost by 2 points, due to a score with 1:38 left in the game.

Today, students are visibly upset. Some are blaming the refs (I wasn't at the game, so I can't comment--although several papers across the state did cite examples of some missed calls--one even said that if high school had instant replay, we would have won the game). I'm sad I missed out, but I was at a speech and debate tournament. Had we won, I wouldn've been able to go to the State Championship game. Oh well.

Overall, this is the best showing we've ever had. Last year, I blogged about how happy I was with the new football coach becasue he actually made athletes responsible. This time I can blog about how successful he is and how he's earning his giant salary (the largest in the Central TX area).

If you want to know more, read this ESPN article about our team. It was written before we lost in the semi-finals.

We might have lost this Saturday, but the school still feels like it won just by how hard we played.

I haven't blogged in a while because things around here have been crazy!

I spent Halloween and the 4 days after it in the hospital. I'm apparently no longer making red blood cells, so I was extremely anemic. The doctors did a ton of tests, but still can't figure out what's going on. So I'm meeting with specialists at least once a week. I now have my own personal pathologist, hematologist, nephrologist and gastrointernalist (no clue if those are spelled correctly ).

Grades were due this week, and thanks to my little vacation in the hospital I was quite a bit behind in grading.

Add in after school practices with the debate team and the obligatory tournaments on the weekends, and I've fallen a bit behind.

I'm still visiting TV.com. I've kept up with all of my currently airing shows, but I'm not making as much progress adding info to some of my works in progress as I would like. Plus, I've found a guide for a show I really like that's in terrible condition. The editor recently retired and all the summaries appear to be direct copies. I've been holding back submitting, hoping that someone who cared for the show would take it, but that hasn't happened. I'm half way to the editorship with stuff I'd already done, but I'm not sure I want to add another currently airing show to my list. I'll have to keep thinking about it.

Well, this was just a quick note to say hi and hope that everyone out there is doing well.

While the drama here at TV.com rages on, real life continues. I could blog about the bad timing of the release or the fact that most of us knew that it would come with some huge bugs or the fact that the data has taken 2nd place to becoming a MySpace clone or...but I won't.

This weekend was the first speech and debate tournament of the year. Looking at the schedule, we compete every weekend until Thanksgiving. I'm tired just thinking about it! My co-coach and I might try to split some weekends, but logistically that's pretty hard. We had 11 kids compete at this tournament. Two rental vans cost the team about 300.00 for the weekend. A bus would've cost us just 700.00 plus. The problem? Cars need drivers, which requires both of us. I know I've mentioned it, but a speech tournament lasts from about 3pm to midnight on Friday. We are usually back up at 6am on Saturday and compete until 11:00pm on Sat. At least, you hope you are competing that late because that means your kids are doing well. Unfortunately, the older I get, the harder the long schedules are physically.

We did pretty well this weekend. The kids walked away with 4 "shinies" or trophies. And we had 3 other kids who were on the verge of getting awards. Our team is growing and still pretty young. So, all of this hardware is pretty impressive.