I'm a little bit disappointed in how little football I watched last night. After months of anticipation, we get to the first night of the season. By the time I got everyone fed, calmed down, to bed, and went to the couch to turn on the TV, I was in time to see NC State's 4th and long attempt fail with 2 minutes in the fourth quarter. I then got to watch South Carolina run out the clock.

Perhaps you received my tweet of August 14 and were wondering what's the story behind the story. It read, "My wife is trying to get me the first appointment in front of an Obama death panel right now."

On the Wednesday that we were in Maine, our gracious hosts decided that they had had just about enough of little kids and drunk adults, so they headed back to urban Massachusetts for a day of office work rather than continue the adventure with the Linkins and theskinnyonbenny family.

On Sunday, we returned home from a 10-day vacation in New England. We spent a day on each end in Boston, but the majority of the time in Maine. We stayed in a cabin in the middle of lakes, mountains, and a river, where the humidity was low, and the air smelled of pine.

I remember that in 9th grade, a history teacher sought to describe the immensity of China's population by telling us that you could line up all of the people in China, start marching them into the ocean, and the line would go on forever.

All of these are honest-to-god comments that came to my mind when reading people's Facebook updates, and which I didn't think appropriate to leave as replies.

A month or so ago, we were driving through the LSU campus, and there were two university club teams playing that fake sport from Harry Potter with the broomsticks. I only saw what I could glimpse as I passed from a moving car, but they definitely had a few spectators and two teams running around on their sticks.

Here's your new drinking game, good this week only: take a drink every time you hear "New Haven Firefighters."

I'm finally to the point in the Cox customer service process where instead of calling a machine, getting frustrated, and then eventually getting a range of hours during which the guy might show up, the guy calls me directly and asks me for a firm time that he can show up at my house at my convenience. Don't be jealous. You have to suffer through immensely bad service, then take time out of your day to go down and bitch before you can get to this point.

Friday night, I finally put the final coat of sealer in the new bathroom. Our new master bath is a long, skinny room, half of which is blocked off by a glass door and covered in tile. It's a free room with two shower heads. Kind of like an old high-school gym setup -- with no walls or curtains or anything -- but nice.

During an early inning on Friday's LSU baseball game, they went to the standard shot of kid in lap, asleep, wasting her ticket. The kid in question was (I think) a little girl, somewhere from 3 to 5 years old, dressed in LSU gear, and wearing gloves.

More about what we did with Josh and Lisa when they came to town. Read on for giant crustaceans, eschewing tall sugary drinks in souvenir yard glasses, and maybe even a little devil worship.