Cheer for ... (gulp) ... Kentucky!

And so it comes down to this.  58 March Madness games complete, and now I stand alone at the top of a fairly large bracket competition - 62 people - with one very cool prize awaiting the winner, an iPad2.

Our auditors sponsored a bracket challenge for many of their clients, and for fun a couple of us from the office entered our brackets (at no charge).  My philosophy is to go with the higher seeded teams except where I have solid reasoning to choose otherwise, but then to pick a couple of substantial upsets to big teams, which, if they actually happen, will tend to separate me from the pack.  This year I chose Kentucky upsetting Ohio State, who was the team most experts had tabbed as the pre-tournament favorite.  I didn't pick them to win it, but I figured that if they pulled the Sweet 16 upset, it would give me a good chance of standing alone.  I was right.

Now with the Final Four set, most brackets are in shambles because all the #1 seeds have been eliminated, and two complete underdogs have made it this far.  That's all well and good, but for me it all comes down to the match-up between Kentucky and UConn.  If Kentucky wins, I win.  If UConn wins, "mike_fozz 2" (whoever that is) wins.  So despite every fiber of my being gagging on the concept ... GO KENTUCKY!!!!!!!!

If you want to pray for me and Kentucky, I'm sure there's some good justification out there, somewhere, to do so...

Make up your mind...

I'm talking to the weather - make up your mind!  I'm SO ready for spring, and we get enough warmish, nice-ish days that it's starting to feel like it's here or on its way.  And then we have rain and gray cloudiness like today...

The house is coming right along, and it's fun to watch it shoot up.  I walked through this morning on my way to work and was very happy to be able to envision what it's going to feel like and look like.  One thing that's starting to stress me out though is our lack of furniture.  I have these grand plans to build a bunch of it, but I'm starting to realize that actually takes time, and we will be moving into the house maybe even as early as two months from now.  Sheesh, I better get started!

It will be fun to see some of the Baughs today as they came to Utah for a funeral.  Angela can't wait to hang out with Amy, and the girls will have fun with their CA friends for a while.  Busy, busy weekend ahead of us.  We're headed skiing for probably the last time (during the day that is, we still have one more night skiing trip planned next week for FHE) tomorrow - we were shocked to learn that Sundance closes for the season next weekend.  I guess they're ready for spring too...  We also have Anne's baby blessing, Micah and Ang are going to the General YW conference, and who knows what else.  I don't have to worry any more about fitting a BYU basketball game in there, although I am sort of interested in what happens in some of the games tomorrow - if Kentucky pulls off a stunning upset of Ohio State, things could get very interesting in one of my pools.

We're starting to find some fun new friends.  Ang and I went to dinner this week with a couple who are fun, and have Bay Area experience.

House progress...

This is what the house looked like yesterday morning ... not a piece of lumber in sight.

This is what the house looked like at 6:30 pm yesterday evening ... basement completely framed, floor on, garage walls up, and 16 guys working simultaneously on other walls.  Nice.

Leftovers

The sign of a great weekend is lots of leftovers - sure I like food leftovers, and there are some of those, but more than that I mean leftover good feelings, leftover fun memories, and leftover energy to attack the new week.  So I guess that means this weekend was a good one...

When you have a big extended family like I do, it's hard to get everyone together on a regular basis.  But when you can swing it, it's always fun.  We had a great family dinner, celebrating five recent birthdays, and eating some amazing food.  OK, the bulk of the food was all really good, but the frosted orange rolls were downright amazing.  Even Angela had three...  It was fun to see the family, and catch up with everyone.

I took Brig to the BYU-Utah rugby game up at Rio Tinto stadium on Saturday.  Man would I have liked to play on that ground when I was playing for BYU!  The Cougs dominated the game, as I expected them to, but it wasn't a pushover, it was a physical match with some darn good play by BYU especially.  Brig liked it, and I love having him go with me to stuff like that because I hope to see him out there himself someday.  We ran into some of my old teammates and friends, which was really cool, but it would've even been better if Spencer was there with me.

I got outside on my bike on Saturday for the first time since our move to Utah.  It was heaven!  That's something I've really missed about California - year round riding.  I would've liked to go farther, but in the end I was really happy with 22 miles at a pretty decent clip.  It seems like I have pretty good legs already, thanks to running and to some garage trainer sessions.  Can't wait for consistently better weather to get out there lots more this spring!

I have a new project.  Furniture.  As we watch our house start to go up, it's time to start thinking about filling it with stuff we need (or want, let's be honest).  We visited my sister and her husband in their apartment yesterday because he's been an animal in my Dad's garage workshop, building multiple pieces with some very nice results.  So I wanted to see what he's done, and get some ideas as to what I can do for us.  I've definitely got some fun ideas and can't wait for some weekend trips up to the workshop.

Finally, I've been meaning to write about our friends the Werners for a few weeks now, but I keep either forgetting or not writing in the blog for days.  They're our friends from Los Altos who also have a nice home here in Provo.  We're excited because they're planning to move out and live in their home, so it'll be fun to have some CA friends here.  We had a breakfast with them a few weeks ago and it was great to catch up, see their home, and think about more associations in the future.  Sean's a fire/police man in Santa Clara and may have to commute back there for a while until he gets on the force in Utah, but he's got a pretty good schedule that will allow him to do it.  Hope to see more of them.  (and, I love their kitchen table ... speaking of furniture...).

Huge Bundle of Awesomeness!

Yesterday afternoon, March 2, 2011, digging commenced on our new home!  It seems like we've been waiting forever, so we're super psyched to have ground broken and things underway.  It's right on the way to and from work, and in fact we'll be able to see it going up when I drop Micah off at school, so I'll post periodic updates.  We expect it to go up pretty quickly, and it'll be fun to walk through and see the progress.  Very excited and a little nervous...

Also, I mentioned previously that I'm getting Lasik.  After my prep appointment this morning, I'm officially scheduled for next Friday morning, 3/11, which is great news.  It was kind of a grueling process today as they had to first assess that my eyes are now making enough tears, and then they had to run a whole bunch of other tests to make sure things were good to go.  My eyes have been doing better making tears, but I didn't want to take any chances, so when they put the tear strips in my eyes and left the room, I worked hard to make sure I was tearing up.  I couldn't really get any good tears going by thinking of the kids, so I resorted to physical "persuasions", repeatedly punching myself in the nose, and then finally going to the ever popular nose hair pull.  It worked.

So the whole reason for doing Lasik now is that I've been having problems with my contact lens in my right eye because of some previous and recurring infections.  Well, that's rearing its ugly head again because the scarring on the eye from the infections is going to force me to have one procedure on the right eye - which takes lots longer to heal - and one procedure on the left eye - which will heal quickly, so at least I'll have one good eye...  The other bummer is I can't swim for a couple weeks post surgery, but small price to pay, and it'll give me a chance to hit running and biking harder.  Anyway, I'm excited about all that too.

And in the not-so-awesome category, we've still got our taxes hanging over our heads.  It's time we just bite the bullet and do them, but we're pretty sure we're going to have to pay, so while it will be good to know the damage, I'm not anxious to fork over our $$$.  Oh well, nothing we can do about it ... that's legal anyway.