Blog Update - Finally!

Is anyone still reading this? Here's the brief update: I was able to sell my Worcester townhome in ten days (in a down market!), and moved to Durham in September of 2007. I've been here for over nine months, and I love it! I bought an old house in an established neighborhood here in Durham. Things are going very well. Durham's a wonderful, interesting place to live.

I've taken up cycling in recent months. In March, I owned zero bicycles. I now have two. I use my hybrid bike for some of my around-town transportation, leisure riding down the American Tobacco Trail greenway on weekends, as well as the occasional bike commute to work. I've ridden it the two miles from my house down to the DBAP for Durham Bulls games. I also bought a used road bike, and plan to ramp up my longer-distance riding in preparation for a charity ride this September.

I must say I'm becoming a fan of the Bulls. Games at DBAP are entertaining, although from many observations, not as organic an experience as at the the old ballpark featured in the movie "Bull Durham." You can read more about Durham's baseball history and the old DAP here (a wonderful blog - about as prolific and visually stunning as blogs come).

Also, the Bulls are the farm team for the red-hot Rays, who just happen to have two of my Scoresheet league starters in their rotation. So although my roots are with the Red Sox, I'm really enjoying what the Rays are bringing to the table this season!

What's the future of this blog? I can't answer that. I really hate to make the final announcement that I'm finished with it, because I may post things here on occasion. Right now, it's back-burner for me. Check in every couple of months and see if there's any new content. Obviously, being away from Worcester, I've lost the closeness with the HC teams and access to all the little things I might hear or see that helped inspire my blog posts.

So after a year's break, let's just see what happens, okay? Hope everyone's doing well and enjoying their summer!

Heading South

It's official, I'm moving to North Carolina this year! I have to be there by mid-December or so, but I'd like to see the relocation happen sooner than that. I'll be putting my property on the market in the next couple of weeks, and the rollercoaster ride will begin (if it hasn't already)!

Thanksgiving

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

In other news, I'm going to be cutting back on my blogging. This is a tough decision, as I enjoy posting here and had a recent resurgence, but I have to focus some of my spare time on other things. Not sure when I'll be back to regular posting (it may be a while) but I hope to get back to it, eventually.

Thanks for reading.

More Blog Stuff

As mentioned in this post, we upgraded the blog last week. Specifically, we transferred over to "Blogger in Beta." There's some new behind-the-scenes techie stuff which simplifies things when making future layout changes to the blog. It's more flexible, and many of the upgrades should be invisible to the reader.

But some of the changes are visible to the reader. I already talked about how I can "label" my posts. Another thing I like is the way they added flexibility to the blog archives. Before, you could click on a month and it would display all my posts for that month. You can still do that, but now, by clicking on the little arrow next to each month, you can "preview" the month by seeing the titles of all my posts for that month. And you can then target a specific post. I really like that!

Am I just a little too interested in this? Yeah, probably, but it's sort of given me a second wind as far as this blog is concerned. And the original version of Blogger has had a bunch of outages this week, so I'm glad I switched to the new beta version!

Blog Updates

I'm working on some changes to the blog. My main goal was to make it easier to track posts by topic without having to scroll through the archives.

Of course, you can search my blog by typing your search word(s) into the box at the very top of this page and clicking the "Search this blog" button.

But better than that, Blogger has introduced "labels," which means I can tag a post and file it under various topics. And you can click that label and find all my posts on that topic. So it'll be a piece of cake to find all the "Pearls of Wisdom," for instance! All the labels are listed alphabetically on the right side of the page.

I held off on these changes for a little while, but today I decided to take the plunge. I'm excited about being able to label my posts, but unfortunately, my cool "We Are Crusaders" logo has been sacrificed in the process. Actually, it's been moved from the top of the blog to the bottom, and I have to figure out how to integrate it back at the top as my main title logo. That's for another day.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the upgrades. I'm still tweaking things here and there. And don't be afraid to write comments!

Friday Trivia?

Is my hiatus over? Technically, yes, but I have no idea how frequently I'll be updating the blog this summer. That was a two-and-a-half month break! I hate to say it, but I was probably spending more time on the blog than I should've been, and frankly I haven't missed it that much.

That said, I'll try to post updates more than once every three months! So here's a little something for the Crusader fans out there who are still reading "We Are Crusaders." (And thanks for sticking with me!)

Since "Friday Trivia" has been popular over at Crossports, here's some trivia of my own: Name the year of this photo, along with the coaches and players. I don't think I can identify everyone, so your assistance is needed! (The photo contains a dead giveaway on the year.)

Click on the photo to expand it. Then you may be able to expand it further by putting your mouse over the photo and clicking on the "expand" arrow that shows up on the bottom right corner of the photo.

Happy Easter!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter Sunday.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and best wishes, everyone! I hope you have a pleasant holiday and joyful times spent with your families.

I'll be back to update the blog at some point next week.

Special Christmas wishes to Holy Cross junior basketball player Keith Simmons. His cramping is beyond the point of cracking "V8" jokes. Get well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Best wishes to "We Are Crusaders" readers, and everyone in Crusader Nation.

Genesis

I originally included Holy Cross content in my other blog, Three-Wide Off Four, but realized HC fans probably have little interest in the NASCAR content, and the NASCAR visitors probably don't care about Holy Cross athletics (although of course, they should.)

So I now have two blogs. Look for some different things here than I'd typically post over on the message board on Crossports. Go Crusaders!