Just Plain Chips

While some people don’t like meatloaf, I love it. At least I love my mom’s meatloaf. It’s good stuff. I hadn’t had it in a number of years before having it a couple times in the last month or two. It’s as good as I remember. But I’ve found something odd. It just doesn’t seem to fill me up. I had two huge pieces, along with some carrots and mashed potatoes, for lunch today, and my stomach feels empty. It’s so weird. Does anyone else experience this?

It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to keep eating meatloaf until I filled up, though, would it?

Don’t you hate when you’re mad but there’s really no reason to be mad? And then just the fact that you’re mad makes you even more mad? That’s what’s going on with me.

Okay, because Graham asked nicely, I’ll tell the story of that last chess game I mentioned.

Let me set up the entire situation. I was in 8th grade and I was playing black in this game. My opponent was a little 7th grade girl from Glen Rose, TX, who was rated only about 1000 to my rating of 1300. Why was I playing a girl from Texas in a junior high chess game? Why, I was at the National Junior High Chess Championships, that’s why. This particular game was in the last round of the tournament.

Being in 8th grade instead of 9th and not being all that great I was playing in the Junior Varsity section of the tournament, which was mostly 7th and 8th graders. Not only are there prizes for being one of the top scorers in the tourney, there are team prizes as well. Every team takes their op four scorers in the tourney and compares them to the top four from all the other teams. The team with the highest score from their top four is the champion. In this particular tournament, in this JV section, our team was a pretty good one. We had a couple players that were top scorers overall and a bunch others that were doing pretty well, too.

Back to my game. I remember being uneasy with the position. I certainly didn’t seem to really have any advantage and like my friend Jay said, my bishop was on the wrong colored square to help protect my advanced pawn. And, at this stage in my career I was really uncomfortable in the end game; I had screwed up more even games than had I won.

So I was nervous, I didn’t want to lose to a girl rated 1000, and I was in the last round of the nation tournament. Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah. About the time my opponent made her last move (34. b4) my coach came up with a tournament official. The official was there to make sure my coach wasn’t going to give me any help with the game or any advice. He had a piece of news to give me. The news was: “If you draw or win this game, we (our team, Metcalf Jr. High) will clinch the team National Championship.”

Okay, no pressure. Just don’t lose this game you don’t know if you can win and your team won’t hate you. I thanked him for the news and sat back down at my game and stared at that board. I went through everything to see if there was some way I could pull off a win. After a while I looked across the board and asked my opponent “Do you want a draw?”. She agreed and Metcalf won the National JV Championship.

Dang, my chess crowd dried up pretty quickly and no one else seems interested in my old chess games. If only I had something more interesting to write about than how much I like melty peanut butter and syrup on my waffles.

Have a great weekend.

(If I get some good comments about this, I’ll let you know something very special and interesting about this game. It holds a very special place in my heart, even above the huge upset I talked about. )

Okay, I want my expert friends to examine one more chess position.

White just moved:

34. b5

Who has the upper hand, and what should black and then white do?

Okay, if you haven’t at least taken a look at my last post, you should do so now.
But if you’re one of my intrepid commenters, please forge ahead…
Read whole post…

In case you don’t know, I used to be kind of nerdy. (I know what you’re saying: “used to be?”) I was a member of the chess club throughout all of Junior High, 7th through 9th grades. And I was captain of the chess team my 9th grade year. I had a great time all three years and I have great memories from them. Anyway…

I won’t go into the whole story, but last night in some internet surfing I came across the home page of a guy I beat in the Minnesota Junior High State chess tournament in 9th grade. I happen to remember the name and the game because he was the 2nd highest rated player in the tournament at the time I beat him and thus a big and memorable upset for me.

A link on his site brought me to the homepage of the US Chess Federation. After some mucking around I found my membership data which was also linked to the results of a number of tournaments I played in during my 9th grade year, including the state tourney where I had that huge upset.

In a wave of nostalgia I looked through some of the tounaments. Probably my best one was where I scored 3.5 points out of 4 to tie for 2nd place. In the tournament I beat some unrated guy; my good friend Jay, who was rated higher than me (1519 vs 1264); another kid who was rated even higher than Jay (1738); and I scored a draw against another highly rated guy (1636). I don’t know what I had for breakfast that morning, but I should never have tried anything else.

After looking through my digital results I wondered if I could find something more concrete to look through. Being a pack-rat, I was able to dig through a few piles of stuff and bring out my old scorebooks where I kept notation of all of my chess games. They are little spiral notebooks where you write down all of the moves you do in a chess game. It is meant both as a way to slow yourself down so you don’t make a hasty mistake and also as a learning tool so you can go back over what you did right and wrong during the game. I was able to find the particular game I was thinking about. It was played on April 4th, 1992.

If you don’t know algebraic notation or much about chess, the rest of this probably won’t be very interesting.
Read whole post…

Alright, I’ve just got a few random things to get out of my mind.

A couple of nice things about watching the Vikings yesterday was that I was hanging out with a couple of friends while watching and they had the game in HD. Of course, being in HD just made all the suckitude that much more crisp and clear. Kind of like being able to watch someone vomit in smell-o-vision, there was just that extra bit to make it hurt a little more.

At one point Chris and I were discussing how nearly 100% of announcers are either idiots or are plain annoying or both. Not 10 minutes after that, the color guy for the Vikings game started talking about how poor the Vikings were playing and how they just didn’t even seem like the Vikings. They were the “Diet Vikings”. All of us had a hearly laugh at that. And we had to partially rescind our comment about all announcers being bad. Of course later in the game this same announcer coughed straight into his live microphone right as the game was coming back from a commercial. That was the second most entertaining moment of the game for a Vikings fan though.

So I went to lunch at Subway today and I went there at maybe 12:15 or 12:20 with the idea to get there after the initial rush. Mistake I got there 10 seconds before the height of the line length. Oh well. The most exciting moment of waiting in line was when my friend Allison from Texas walked in the front door. I was taken aback for a moment until I realized that Allison had not taken a supersonic flight up from Austin after emailing me this morning and that this was in fact a different girl who had similarities in her profile.

Anyway, that’s about it. Ciao.

It’s not a good sports weekend when the only good thing that happened was that your fantasy football team pulled out a miraculous win even when two of your running backs didn’t play.

The Gophs lost a heartbreaker. The Vikings got creamed by the Bears. Even the Gophers hockey team, ranked Number 1 in the country, lost and tied Alaska-Fairbanks. Sad. Sad. Sad.

My intrepid fantasy football team though, they are the source of my sporting joy. I didn’t really like my team right from the start of the season and I didn’t think I’d be doing very well. But somehow we pulled out four straight wins to start the season. I lost last week but this week something odd happened. I had three running backs that were listed as “probable” to start. Then, on Sunday morning, right before games started, I read that one of them had been downgraded to “questionable”. So I benched him and put in the two “probable” guys. What do you think happened? My questionable guy ripped off almost 100 yards and two touchdowns versus the Vikings and my two probable guys didn’t get a single carry. Perfect. But somehow, in the face of extreme adversity, the rest of the team pulled together and scored enough for the win. It brought a tear to this jaded fan’s eye.

Okay, not really, but it was a surprise. I would have traded it for a Gopher win though. Rrrr.

I finally went to get my driver’s license renewed. Phew! I’ve been under the radar of the law for way too long. I’ve moved like 18 times in the last five years, and a bunch of those moves were within the state of Montana. What finally prompted me to get a new license? It expired on my birthday a few weeks ago. That’s a good reason I suppose.

The whole thing from the time I left work took barely over 30 minutes, and that included going out of my way to the bank to get money. The service center was empty and I waited approximately zero minutes before getting called up to the counter. The gent there was friendly and helpful. My picture turned out alright, but I probably should have just had him take it again for good measure. I’ll get in in 2-3 weeks and I just couldn’t be more excited.

If you’re curious enough, it’s easy to find information about The Little Brown Jug, the oldest trophy in American college football.

The Univeristy of Minnesota football team had a 16 game losing streak over the last 19 years to the University of Michigan. The Gophers hadn’t won since an upset of then #2 Michigan at Michigan Stadium on the 15th of November in 1986. 1986! I was 10 years old and did not follow college football.

This weekend, the Gophers finally got that 800 pound wolverine off of their back with a big win over Michigan, again at Michigan Stadium, this last Saturday. It was a frustrating but exciting game to watch. The Gophers were always in it, but never seemed to be able to overcome and get ahead. They had tons of huge stops on 3rd down and a few big sacks.

Near the end of the game the clock malfunctioned and no one knew how much time was left. The referee had to keep time on the field. It was very frustrating to watch, and even the TV guys didn’t know the time except for a few occasions when the time must have been relayed up to the booth from the field. Minnesota got the ball with just under 3 minutes left after stopping Michigan. They ran a few plays, even got a first down, but were mainly just going for overtime. Michigan even called a few timeouts in expectation of getting the ball back and trying for one last score. But then, on 3rd and 9 from their own 26 yard line, super backup Gary Russell sprang an outside run for 61 yards to set up a chance for a game winning field goal. The Gophers ran a few plays to the middle of the field and finally called timeout with 5 or 6 seconds remaining. The freshman kicker, Justin Giannini, came on and made the 30 yard field goal for the win. A fantastic finish.

Here’s a picture of some of the Gopher’s planting the U’s flag at the center of the field after the game. I bet the Michy fans didn’t like that.

And, for an extra boost of fun for any Minnesota Golden Gopher fan, the Wisconsin Badgers had been upset 51-48 by the Northwestern Wildcats a little earlier in the day. Hooray!

It’s been a pretty slow week in the world of just plain chips. So sorry. I should have written about my fun weekend in Pennsylvania and put up a couple more pictures. But the ones I posted were the best already. And there wasn’t much more to the weekend than the game. I guess there were a few cat calls, albeit unimpressive ones:

Minnesota sucks!
Personal foul for being gay!
Your mascot is a rodent!

There seemed to be a high percentage of good looking women wandering around PSU, so that wasn’t too bad. Our hosts (parents of a friend of Eric’s) were super friendly. The mother made us sweet rolls for when we arrived. They were very good. And she made us breakfast on Saturday morning and they took us out to breakfast on Sunday. Eric and I did try to eat downtown State College on Friday night but we got what must have been the last of the night’s food. It was pretty bad. Dinner after the game on Saturday was very good indeed. But that could have been because I had had nothing but a little ice cream since breakfast.

And the rest of the week hasn’t been too exciting. Oh, I did go out to dinner at the Lion’s Tap with Chey on Tuesday. It was pretty tasty. And they have 1919 rootbeer on tap, which I had heard was very good, and I wasn’t led astray.

Umm, that’s it. Thanks for reading, sorry for the lack of content lately.

Go Gophers! Beat Michigan.

Okay, so the game sucked but the trip was fun. Here are a few pictures from the weekend (click on the thumbs to get a closer look).

This is looking from the upper deck on the North end towards the South end of the stadium before game time.

Here is a view of the visitor’s section where most of the Gopher fans were seated. Not too many compared to the announced crowd of 106,000+.

Here’s the West side of the stadium during the game. So full of people.

The game was on ABC, so we had the Good Year Blimp overhead.

Here was something cool that the student section did. The Lions had just punted and pinned the Gophs on the 2 yard line (if you look at the scoreboard, they are now on the 4 after gaining 2 on 1st down) with their backs to the band and the student section. The student section went nuts and every one of them put up the signal for a safety. I thought it was sweet.