My 10 days have come to a close. I am very blessed! Blessed to have a WONDERFUL 10 days back home on the east coast!
* Blessed to visit best friends in Nashville/Cookeville, & see a little 6-week-old sweetheart!
* Blessed to have a wonderful holiday at home with my dad & aunt.
* Blessed with a replacement camcorder (since mine was stolen before going overseas to Egypt/Israel).
* Blessed to travel down to Auburn to see Uncle, Aunt, 2 cousins, my adorable 2nd cousin (Ella Rose - 5 in May), brother, & soon-to-be sister-in-law! (Got to see many good friends as well, although not many were home for church services. Too bad it couldn't be closer to the new semester so I could visit with others as well.)
* Blessed to have a fancy day-before-birthday lunch at Provino’s, & then a game night with friends full of laughter.
* Blessed to wake up on my birthday & have a little 4-year-old red-headed sweetheart to come cuddle with me & sing me happy birthday! ::heart melts::
* Blessed to take my soon-to-be sister to get her nails done so she can show off “the hardware.”
* Blessed to have almost all of my family together for birthday lunch at Cracker Barrel!
* Blessed to have a safe trip back to TN...praying for a safe drive to Nashville airport tomorrow morning (early...) & a safe flight back to Cali.
* Blessed to go to Disneyland & to see Wicked in L.A. on Friday once I return to Cali.
* What a blessing it is to have the means to travel...hopefully I'll be blessed to do it again!
* ...And now, despite my procrastination, I am blessed to have all this stuff to try to fit in my allotted suitcases! ;o)
I hope y’all had a very merry “giftsmas” & have a HAP-PY NEW YEAR!!! ...And go tell David & Rachel congrats! ;o)
Go online & find your nearest "Steve & Barry's" store...they're going out of business. Many (like the one in Auburn) already have, but for the more-than-frugal shoppers (my dad included) everything in the store is usually $8.98 except for shoes that go as high as $20. Now with the closings, EVERYTHING was 50% off. I don't normally plug stores, but you can't beat this. My dad got 6 pair of basketball shoes for $7.50 each! Coats for $5, etc...go check it out now! ;o)
you mentioned that you saw them in nashville/cookeville and i was just making sure that none of my friends had a baby without me knowing about it. when you said it was annie, i felt really stupid for not figuring that out!
Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze
For the holidays, you can't beat home, sweet home
I met a man who lives in Tennessee and he was headin' for
Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie
From Pennsylvania folks are trav'lin' down to Dixie's sunny shore
From Atlantic to Pacific, gee, the traffic is terrific
Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays, you can't beat home, sweet home
I love these opportunities to come home, especially for something as nostalgic as the holidays.
I landed the 20th and fly back out west on the 30th.
I hope you each have a very merry giftsmas & a happy new year!
Have a great trip!! We'll be at Jason's parents in Ten Mile/Kingston area tonight - Friday...we'll be at Oak Ridge Wednesday night for Bible study..maybe we could meet up??
You're Auburn University and your cross-state rival Alabama, after lying dormant for a decade, has become formidable again. You've had a mediocre season and you won't play in a bowl game for the first time in nine years. But you're OK. You have a coach who has been the model of stability in an unstable business.
You've had Tommy Tuberville for 10 seasons. That became the longest tenure of any coach in the Southeastern Conference once Tennessee fitted Phillip Fulmer with a pair of cement coaching shoes. Even after going 5-7, your coach has won nearly 70 percent of his games against everyone (85-40, .680), and exactly 70 percent (7-3!) against the hated Crimson Tide.
Tuberville has won one SEC and five Western Division titles and been unbeaten one season. That 2004 team performed well enough to play for a national championship. Too bad the BCS ripped you off.
Having a coach like that is good. The last thing you want to do when facing Nick Saban Inc. is call in the moving vans and start over. Only someone with an athletic death wish would trade in a coach with 10 years of recruiting ties throughout the Southeast for a staff that might not be able to find 6A finalist Hoover High with a pack of bloodhounds and a Garmin.
You're Auburn, and you're too big, too sure of yourself to panic every time someone in Tuscaloosa raises a trophy. Once upon a time you panicked. Remember five years ago, when the university president led a secret delegation to interview Bobby Petrino at Louisville? That president and the genius boosters who egged him on forgot that Auburn still employed a football coach. They also proved to be about as clandestine as Inspector Clouseau.
Tommy Tuberville
Ned Dishman/Getty Images
Tommy Tuberville coached the
Tigers to an 85-40 record during
his Auburn tenure.
The media mocked you for months, and you looked even dumber when Tuberville took the team to a 13-0 record a year later.
Good thing that president is long gone. You've got a new athletic director, too. Surely they wouldn't be stupid enough to make the same mistake and run off Tuberville. During games, he barely has a pulse. They call him the Riverboat Gambler for his play-calling guts. And big games? Not only is he 7-3 against Alabama, he has won nine of his past 14 games against top-10 teams.
Off the field, his players don't get in trouble. They go to class, too. In 2007, 20 players had at least a 3.0 GPA.
It's like they say on Wall Street. When the masses are selling, the smart guys are buying. The SEC masses are selling. Tennessee is starting over with 33-year-old Lane Kiffin. Mississippi State forced out Sly Croom. You want to know what not to do? LSU fans are grumbling about Les Miles one year after he held the crystal football!
That leaves Ole Miss and Arkansas, and if you're worried about them, you're not the Auburn you claim to be.
Sure, Tuberville doomed this season to mediocrity the minute he hired that offensive coordinator, the high school guru who promised to install the spread offense. Turns out that knowledge-wise, the guy had outkicked his coverage. Tuberville fired him a month into the season, admitted his mistake, and tried to minimize the damage. He didn't pawn off the responsibility on anyone else. He took the blame and promised to fix the problem.
Yeah, those boosters, the ones who embarrassed you over Petrino, are still unhappy, but you're Auburn. You're bigger than that. No coach is going to win in the SEC every season. Tuberville has delivered for you for 10 years. Surely that engenders some loyalty from you to him.
Besides, you signed a contract that promised him $6 million if you let him go after the 2008 season. In these economic times, with people everywhere trying to hold on to their jobs and their mortgages, you surely aren't stupid enough to spend $6 million paying a guy not to coach. No one could be that insensitive to the message that would send. Talk about misplaced priorities.
What's that?
You let him go?
You're going to pay him $6 million not to coach?
And start over from scratch? Against Nick Saban?
You're kidding, right? Is there something about Tommy Tuberville that causes you to make agonizingly stupid decisions?
Forget I ever brought it up. Good luck finding a coach better than the one you just forced out. Whoever he is, give him a message:
Hoover High is just south of Birmingham.
Ivan Maisel is a senior writer for ESPN.com. Send your questions and comments to Ivan at Ivan.Maisel@ESPN3.com. His new book, "The Maisel Report: College Football's Most Overrated & Underrated Players, Coaches, Teams, and Traditions," is on sale now. For more information, go to TheMaiselReport.com.
What a great article! I am still in shock that they fired him!!! It was just days earlier that I was telling my husband that there was no way they would be stupid enough to fire him for one bad season, and then they actually did it!!! Crazy people!
Doctors in Arizona thought a Phoenix-area woman had a possible brain tumor, but it turned out there was something else penetrating her brain – a worm.
Rosemary Alvarez started experiencing numbness in her arm and blurred vision. She went to the emergency room twice and had a cat scan, but everything came up clear, MyFOXPhoenix.com reported.
It wasn’t until doctors took a closer look at an MRI that they discovered something very disturbing.
“Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good,” neurosurgeon, Dr. Peter Nakaji told the news station. “It's something down in her brain stem which is as deep in the brain as you can be.”
Alvarez was wheeled into surgery where Nakaji and his colleagues were expecting to remove a tumor, but they uncovered a worm instead.
On a video of the surgery, Nakaji can be heard chuckling after he made the discovery.
“I'm sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room,” he told MyFOXPhoenix.com. “But because I was so pleased to know that it wasn't going to be something terrible.”
Doctors removed the worm and don't believe Alvarez will have any lingering health problems. No one knows exactly where she picked up the worm –- doctors said worms can come from eating undercooked pork or spread by people who don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom, according to the report.
“It only takes one person who is spreading it constantly to get a lot of people exposed and some of those people are going to go on to develop this problem,” Nakaji said.
Alvarez, who is now healthy and has resumed normal activities such a playing ball with family in her backyard, said she hopes people learn this lesson from her story.
“Wash your hands, wash your hands,” she added.
You can read more and see the video of the surgery from my MyFOXPhoenix.com.
Yeah I saw this at work. There's a guy I work with who has a reputation for rolling out of the bathroom without washing his hands. In my 2.5 years workign here I've managed to not shake his hand ever.
Was that you on the cover of the Truth magazine? Great pics! Did you go home for Thanksgiving? Hope you're doing well! We need to catch up soon! Love ya!
