CUBS WIN!

The Cubs win! They beat the Brewers this afternoon to chip 2 games off of their magic number! Geovany Soto is my hero, hitting a 3-run homer with 2 down in the bottom of the 9th to send it into extra innings. D-Lee hits a blooper into shallow center in the bottom of the 12th to send... wait for it... JASON "I'm a baseball player, not a pitcher" MARQUIS home for the game winning run. The magic number is 2!

Best part of the game: Megan and I watched this amazing game LIVE. Yeah, I finally convinced her to subscribe to the North American Sports Network (NASN), the ex-pat's saving grace in the land of no ESPN. This station gets MLB, NFL, College Football and Basketball, and other sports that only folks from the US and Canada care about.... like curling! :) The Cubs making their post-season run was reason enough for me to subscribe. Watching the game live was almost as good as spending the afternoon at the Friendly Confines... except without the Old Style, sunshine, or post-victory dance party at Sluggers!

LET'S GO CUBS!!!!

Red Bull Air Races

We have also recently gone to the Red Bull Air Races. This is really cool, and if you have a chance to check it out you definitely should. Pilots flying <20 feet off the Thames between big air-filled pylons at 200+ miles per hour. Pretty incredible. Sometimes they'd misjudge the pylons and fly into them - they were made of special parachute-like material that was designed to explode or disintegrate in sections on impact to stay out of their propellers. Then the crew would stitch a new section back on and fill it full of air again and it would be back up in less than 5 minutes. Really spectacular.

For your viewing pleasure:

Running from thirty

Yes, the rumo(u)rs are true. I'm turning thirty. As a gift to myself, I'm running a marathon. Anyone who's crazy enough to want to (or is in danger of a birthday ending in "0" themselves) is welcome to join me. Anyone who's more sane (or has already passed their own midlife crisis) can join Meg.

What's wrong with this picture?

We went to see the Dolphins play the Giants at Wembley Stadium yesterday. It was my first-ever live NFL game.


We had tons of fun, even though the NFL vastly underestimated the love of American football here. They ran out of most of the merchandise before the game even started. Several concession stands ran out of beer (they don't serve beer at football [soccer] matches because the fans are rabid enough already). Weirdly, though, there were tons of empty seats even though it was sold out.

More photos on my Flickr site.

thoughts on sports...

Wow, what a weekend... South Africa wins the Rugby World Cup, the World Series teams have been set (let's go Rockies!), and the Chicago Bears go 97 yards on the final drive of the game to score a TD with 9 seconds to go, beating the Eagles 19-16!