Thanks For The Memories Timmy!!!

Hi Everybody,

I'm in Gainesville waiting for the pre-game hoopla to start. Kerry is on campus finishing up some lab work and when she is finished she will come home, pick us up and off to the game we will go. I can't wait. The atmosphere here is loony. It's like being at a Paul McCartney concert only more so. There should be 100,000 people at the game and we will be sitting with the students in the 10th row of the end zone. We have bought our Gators tatoos to put on our faces before the game so we should fit right in with the drunken students. LOL

Yesterday Kerry and I got up at 5:30am, put on 4 layers of clothes and waited in 36 degree weather for 3 hours to get the correct tickets for the game. They only had 500 upgraded tickets available and I think if we had been 15 minutes later we would not have made it. Kerry has a student ID but Pat and I had to have a certain sticker on our tickets or we couldn't go. It's just another way to make money but totally worth it. We froze our butts off but it was another wonderful time that we will never forget.

Pat has some kind of foot injury. His ankle is all swollen up and black and blue but he doesn't remember thing that might have happened to cause this. It started at home a day or two before we left and has just gotten worse and worse. I hope he makes it through todays festivities alright.

Rigby did really well in the car but all the activity of Kerry's apartment complex is driving him crazy. Every time a car door slams or he hears people talking he starts barking. He is a Lhasa Apso and that's what his breed is all about. He's an alarm dog which normally is a good thing but not so good at 3:00 in the morning. LOL.

Well, that's it from crazy Gainesville. We will all be at the game early to say goodbye to Tim Tebow. It is his last game at The Swamp and I'm sure there will be lots of crying and upset but excitement too. We will be going home tomorrow and back to work for me on Monday.

Goodbye Timmy. Thanks for 4 fantastic years of exciting, winning football. We will miss you. GO GATORS!!!!!

Yes Laura, We Won

Yes Laura, The Gators won. The first half was especially ugly with Timmy Tebow throwing two, count them, two interceptions. That's as many as he had thrown all season. He did pick it up in the second half and our defense played great the whole game. They stopped the Sooners at first and goal twice with The Gators taking over on downs. Tim Tebow was named Most Valuable Player and Gainesville went crazy. Both of these events were expected. Kerry tells me that University Drive was filled with thousands of kid both celebrating and drunk. Life is good in the Gator Nation. See below.





On another note, I am feeling like crap. I've got a full blown head cold and I'm spending the day in bed. I was feeling alright until the end of my shift at Curves last night. I started stuffing up and not being able to hear that well. Lisa asked me to work tonight but being sick I said no. I hope I am feeling better tomorrow. I hate to waste a three day weekend in bed.

I'm going to crawl into bed now. See ya. GO GATORS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Go Gators Again

Tonight is college football's national championship game between the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners. The hype around here has been huge. South Florida is a hotbed of rabid Gator fans. Either we went to UF or our kids do. To top it all off the game itself is being played in what used to be called Joe Robbie Stadium and is now Dolphin Stadium in Miami. Everyone is going wild. The newspapers are filled with stats and stories about the coaches and players as is the TV coverage but when it comes down to it it's all about one thing. One player. Tim Tebow.

Timmy Tebow is the kind of kid you would want for your son. He is a nice, sweet and down home kind of kid. He is also fiercely competitive and that's what this game is all about. When UF lost to Ole Miss (which never in a million years should have happened) Tim got on TV and promised that "no player in the entire country will play as hard as I will play the rest of the season. And you'll never see someone push the rest of the team as much as I will push everybody the rest of this season. And you'll never see a team play harder than we will the rest of this season. God Bless." He said all this with a tear in his eye and we all felt for him. We knew that he was telling the truth as he knew it. So far he has lived up to this statement.

Kerry tells me that she has seen Timmy around the campus. She says that he is absolutely huge. She also says that he is a nice and sweet guy who is not in any way full of himself as one might expect of a famous football player. He is friendly and open to everyone. She says it's obvious that he wants to win this game. He doesn't care about another Heisman Trophy. He only cares about winning this game and having the Gators become the national champs. We all wish him luck.

I have to work tonight and I will be wearing a University of Florida shirt to Curves. I will be sure to dress Rigby in his orange and blue bandanas for luck. At kickoff time I will be in front of my big screen HDTV hoping for the best for Timmy and the rest of the Gator players. So GO GATORS AND GO TIM TEBOW. We are all rooting for you.

GO GATORS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When Kerry got accepted to the University of Florida we had no choice but to become Gators parents. Anytime I wear a UF shirt someone that I don't know in a mall or at a gas station passes me by and says "go gators". It's what you do when you are a gator or a gator parent. One time I was walking through the Luxor casino in Las Vegas wearing my screaming orange Gator shirt and someone from the top of the pyramid yelled "go gators" at me. I, of course, yelled back. Like I said, it's what you do when you are part of the gator nation.

Saturday night was the SEC championship football game to decide who was going to go to the national championship game. It was between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Florida Gators. It was a HUGE game especially around here in South Florida. One reason for this is that so many of our local kids are up at UF. It's the premier college in Florida and if you can get in you go. The kids all work their asses off all during high school trying to get into UF. If they have great grades, great SATs, great extra circulars, great essays, great letters of recommendations and happen to play a mean clarinet they get in. If not, if's FSU or UCF for them. All Kerry wanted was to go to UF and I am proud to say that she made it, not an easy task these days.

Kerry playing at her junior recital.

The other reason that this was such a huge game was we wanted, we needed, we had to kick Nick Saban's butt. Nick Saban is the coach for Alabama and a few years ago the Miami Dolphins lured him away from college football and hired him as our coach. He sucked as many college coaches do when they come to the NFL. That in itself wasn't so bad but as the media was giving him a hard time for being a sucky coach a rumor started that he was going to leave the Dolphins and go back to college. Even that wasn't so bad. We would have understood that but the corker was when the newspapers and TV people asked him outright "Hey Nick, are you leaving the Dolphins and going back to college?" he said "No, I'm here and you can count on me." Well, needless to say, the next day he was gone. He not only proved himself to be a crappy coach but he was also a liar. This was the real reason that we all wanted the Gators to beat the Crimson Tide. To kick their asses all over the field. To humiliate them.

The game started at 4:00 and I was ready. I was wearing my UF shirt in front of my big screen HDTV with Rigby dressed in two bandanas. One blue and one orange. He is, after all, a Gator dog. I don't remember being this excited about a sporting event since Jimmy Connors played his last US Open or maybe Tiger Woods playing his last US Open. No, this was more important. We HAD to win.

Gator Rigby

It was a very exciting game. Tim Tebow, our superman quarterback, played his ass off as all of our Gator kids did. The lead changed 4 or 5 times. I sat on the bed yelling and screaming and finally the game was over and the Gators poured a huge vat of Gatorade and ice over Coach Urban Meyer's head. We had won. It was not the ass kicking that we all had hoped for but just winning was good enough. Nick Saban had been sent packing with his head down low and us Gators? We are going to the national championship game in Miami of all places. We will be playing the Oklahoma Sooners on January 8.

By the way, the Dolphins won yesterday without Nick Saban and are now leading the division so yeah, GO Dolphins and GO GATORS!!!!!!!