On Sunday night, we went to an Oscars party. As any decent event-based party should have, there was gambling. It was a normal ballot with all of the categories and points broken down as 5 for the big categories that people care about (actor, director, etc.), 3 for the mid-majors (cartoon, song), and 1 for the junk that you just have to sit through (sound editing, best gaffer, and guy who's best at setting up celebrities' trailers on film sets). The awards were broken down for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place as 50%/30%/25%.

It's kind of embarrassing to post a story from the week of Christmas this far after the holiday, but there are two reasons that I'm okay with it. First, it's an observation that needs to be shared with the world at large who's never tried to drink in a bar in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Second, nothing ever changes in this bar, so everything short of the candy cane covered sweater will be just as true this coming Saturday, next Saturday, and the first Saturday of July 2009.

If you've been reading along with me the whole way, you will have come to realize that the end of my posts about football inevitably lead to posts about parades. Prior to this weekend, I had talked about going to a couple of parades, but hadn't actually been to any. There were a few decent ones on Saturday, but I skipped those as well. But I was excited to return to the Krewe of Mutts -- the parade for dogs in downtown Baton Rouge.

A description of my post.

The day before yesterday, I got home from work, and I was feeling a little bit funk, so I decided to hop in the shower. I went to the spare bathroom downstairs because the combination of the shower head and the water pressure is the best I know. It reminds you of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer got a shower head that they use to hose down elephants at the circus. I could hose down an elephant in my downstairs bathroom, and to shower under that kind of stream is nice.

Many years ago, I was fairly certain that Scott Adams had a secret camera in our offices, and used it to grab the easy pickings for Dilbert strips. Now, I've gotten to be fairly certain that he loaned the tapes to the group of people who write episodes of The Office for NBC.

I'm posting this from a short work trip to North Carolina. I flew into Raleigh with Tyler (of sporadic haiku acclaim) and Ann, a sixty year old career woman whose energy and patience is double what we younger guys have. While we were walking out of the Raleigh airport, she's moving along at a good clip, toting what appears to be seventy-five pounds of luggage. We got to an intersection, and she asked, "You guys want to take a short cut out of here?"

This is the first weekend of the last three that I've been at home with Mrs. theskinnyonbenny. It's good to be back in a routine, but cold and rainy Louisiana winters are for the birds. We had two days without rain this week, and I made it outside to enjoy the sunshine somewhere around zero minutes. The weekend forecast is entirely for rain.

I had a conference call scheduled today at 11:00. Unfortunately, I hadn't had a chance to take my morning bathroom break yet, and the call promised to be a difficult one. I dialed in to the number, and found that it was just hold music. The host hadn't started the call yet.

Several years ago, I was a true corridor crawler, spending all day every day going meeting to meeting to meeting. We reorganized the company a few years ago, and the resulting structure and physical layout eliminated 90% of the internal meetings that wasted the days away.

If there's anything more boring than a blog where people recommend random music that they like (especially without a feature that allows you to play the song right then and there), then it's a diet blog. I mention this only because I'm veering very close to boring diet blog territory with this post. But stick with me a moment.

I started several posts this week, but never had the time to go back and look over what I read, fix the really dumb mistakes, and get them posted. There were a lot of sports-related topics on my mind this week, so I've combined a few different false-starts into a single weekly sports post for today.