NOW what am I going to do on Sundays?

On this, the final Sunday of the NFL regular season, I feel like I ought to commemorate the end of my fantasy football season, which wrapped up last week. Fantasy football is a pretty big deal to me, so I figure that this blog post might assist me in the mourning process.... mourning that the season has sadly yet inevitably come to an end ... as well giving me an opportunity to bemoan the fact that, in spite of unprecedented effort and dedication on my part, I failed to win a single league championship this year.

Perhaps next year my obsession with Maurice Jones-Drew will finally bear fruit.

+ =

I was in 4 (and a half) leagues this year, all hosted by Yahoo! Sports. Once you're involved in more than 2 leagues, it becomes much more complicated as you routinely find yourself cheering for players in one league, and against them in another league. But it's well worth a little confusion... Anyway, here's how they panned out:

League: Liga Guadalupe
Team: The Fudge Pact
Result: 4th place of out 10 (8-8 record)
Created and managed by my friend Michael, the Liga was fairly competetive, with some bizarre twists in terms of rosters and scoring (2 starting QBs, 7 WRs, 4 RBs, and minimal bench room) intended to encourage/mandate maximum player movement and very "deep" rosters. I started off this league with a fairly disastrous draft (highlighted by an accidental pick of injured WR Bobby Engram in the 3rd round), and I never fully recovered. Although I held the second-place position position for much of the year and led the league in roster moves, I finished outside of the top three. poo.


League: The Frerotte Fur Yacht
Team: The Flaming Moes
Result: 2nd place out of 8 (13-3 record)
My third year in this league of CCU buddies was my most successful to date, although I'm pretty disappointed at losing the championship game after entering as a clear favorite. Oh well, at least I beat Bmer.


League: Bottle Rocket
Team: The Shrieking Eels
Result: 2nd place out of 8 (11-5 record)
This was my first shot at setting up and running a league, and it turned out to be pretty fun. Most people in the league (including my dad) were fantasy virgins, and I think I got a couple people hooked for life! Alas, Jonny Z was just too powerful in the end... His Harry Back was carried to victory on the shoulders of ... unbelievably ... Cedric Benson.


League: That's What She Said
Team: Big Tuna
Result: 3rd place out of 12 (11-5 record)
In this "the office"-themed league, I had a good run, but ultimately fell short, due in part to my tendency to "homer"... starting Jay Cutler, Eddie Royal, and whichever uninjured Broncos running back I could find for most of the year... and Marion Barber's end-of-the-year disappearance certainly didn't help things at all.

I was also in another quasi-league, invented by my friend Brian as an experimental inverse-league of sorts... which rewarded poor play and punished good play. The Yahoo! scoring restrictions made the overall results less-than-ideal, but it was fun to start players like Brodie Croyle and Jamarcus Russell and watch your score plummet. I finished in second place, with a score of negative 728.7.

Countdown to next year's draft = ~8 months. You really ought to think about joining my league.

Feeling Curious

Don't buy it, just order a cup of fancy coffee at the bookstore and read the whole thing before they finish putting the whipped cream on your peppermint mocha.

No theatrical release this Christmas season has intrigued or excited me more than "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". Although it was released on Christmas Day, I haven't yet had the opportunity to see it. Among the seemingly endless rave reviews that I've read, at least one reviewer described it as "possibly one of the greatest films ever made." And I have to admit, the previews make it look pretty fantastic. It just looks like the kind of movie I'd really enjoy, and I am completely enamored with the premise... or at least, what I know of the premise.

Not being nearly as sophisticated or well-read as I would like people to think that I am, I rarely have an actual opportunity to utter (any version of) the following sentence while exiting a movie theater: "Well, I thought it was a decent adaptation, but the book was definitely better/worse/longer/more confusing/less cheesy/composed primarily of paper, ink, and glue/etc." Therefore, when I discovered that "Button" was actually based/inspired by a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I decided to take the opportunity to familiarize myself with the original story before seeing the movie. Like a real-live smart person.

Being only 24 pages long, the story did not represent a gigantic time commitment on my part. I'm a pretty slow reader, but it still took me far less time to read the short story than it will require to absorb the entire 2 hour and 47 minute film version.

Basically, the story is about a man who is born old, and becomes younger throughout his life. My understanding from the previews was that the title character was born with an old body, but with the intellectual and emotional capacity of an infant. Until I see it, I won't know for sure if the film version conforms to my pre-conceptions ... but the original short story absolutely did not. In Fitzgerald's tale, Benjamin is born as a full-sized, 80-year-old man ... 5 1/2 feet tall, with advanced language skills, a clear understanding of contemporary (19th century) culture, and a cantakerous personality. (needless to say, the book never once mentions his mother, or acknowledges the catastrophic physical ramifications that such a birth would likely wreak upon the average hip-possessing woman)

At first, I was horribly disappointed by this... feeling like it took the "suspension of disbelief" a couple steps too far. As if the basic premise of the story isn't fanciful enough, it was very unpleasant for me to imagine a literal elderly, white-bearded man lying in a hospital nursery crib, shouting at nurses, complaining of itchy blankets, and refusing to drink from a bottle. I thought for sure that the film version must correct this element of the story, especially since the previews clearly show a small, crying, yet physically elderly "baby" ...

However, as the story went on, I realized it still worked. In fact, it very quickly seemed essential to Fitzgerald's parable that Benjamin regressed in terms of his personality as well as his physical attributes. It made for a fascinating story, as Benjamin relates to and interacts with his parents, his friends, his wife, and eventually, his children.

Anyway, I ultimately really enjoyed the story. Fitzgerald could have included MUCH more detail, and easily expanded this story into a full novel ... but since he didn't, I'm all the more eager to see how the film version fills in the enormous gaps in Benjamin's life that F. Scott simply skips over. Perhaps once I've finally seen the movie (hopefully in the next several days), I'll come back and write a comparative analysis. On second thought, thinking about doing that makes me tired, so perhaps I won't. We'll see.

Has anybody seen it yet? Do tell...

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I found Fitzgerald's writing style to be delightful and engaging. My favorite sentence from the book:

"One day [Benjamin's father] brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that he should "play with it," whereupon the old man took it with a weary expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day."

In this particular volume, there are dozens of other short stories published by Fitzgerald throughout the 20's and 30's. If I come across any other gems, I'll be sure to mention them in a future post.

Toro Es, Out.

Christmas in Cedaredge

Our family is slowly accepting a new Christmas tradition that has imposed itself upon us over the past several years. Because my job requires that I sing, strum, and Stille Nacht through any number of Christmas Eve worship services every December 24th, we typically aren't able to get out of town until Christmas morning.

Last year, we made the 367-mile trek to Kearney, NE, through a massive blizzard, spending most of our Christmas day crawling down I-76 through several inches of unplowed snow. Karissa, who was 3 months pregnant at the time, still shudders at the memory of warming up a frozen burrito in the microwave at a gas station in Ogalala for Christmas dinner.

This year, after only one (extremely stressful) Christmas Eve service at The Sanctuary, the Toro Es family woke up bright and early in an attempt to beat the "blizzard of the year" that was apparently racing us to the Western Slope. We made the trip to Grandma GiGi and Grandpa HeyDad's house in Cedaredge in just over 6 hours, snacking on pastrami sandwiches, Doritos, and Beef Jerkey that Karissa packed ahead of time. Finley slept practically the entire way, which was a small miracle, since he rarely dozes longer than 30 minutes at a stretch during daylight hours. We didn't even have to crank up the astonishingly inane "Wee Sing Silly Songs" CD until the last 25 minutes of the drive, when Finn finally decided that he was finished staring at the back of the seat, and needed a distraction.

In our sleep-deprived packing stupor, we forgot to load the Pack 'n Play into Clementine (our trusty Toyota Matrix). Finley, who is a total routine junkie, has had a great deal of trouble spending evenings away from home recently. So we were a tad apprehensive about the sleeping situation ... until we arrived, and discovered GiGi's solution. Apparently, Great-Grandpa Holmes brought a suitcase that he didn't want anymore, and it just happened to be about 6-month-old size.

He won't sleep in the suitcase for more than an hour at a time, even during the night ... we think he feels a bit too confined. However, it has become the iconic image of this Christmas at the Record house ... and I thought that, for my first-ever blog post, I should share it with you.

Krismasi njema, everybody. (that's Swahili for "don't feed the zebras")

This is going to be a really good year.