I cried like a baby when I got home. Good luck. Billy posted that photo of his son. Take a photo and then go home and cry.

:lol: Hey, it's addicting once you get there. You'll never regret being addicted, and you'll never need any therapy. :lol:

Wait til you leave him at college. You need a shop vac to keep up with the excess moisture.

He couldn't handle Cleveland, OH, the city where I was born, so he's not going to handle any other NFL city. Could you imagine if the Raiders picked him up and then moved to Las Vegas?! He's done it to himself and I don't have any sympathy for him.

Interesting thing is that as a girl your reaction is understandable. As a boy you would have accepted dad's behavior and passion as the way it's supposed to be. Role models.

I would have been thinking "Better you than me". That's a lot of confidence in anesthesia. :lol:

Johnny is going to get a nice fat suspension if anyone even considers giving him a contract.

I still remember that day like it was last week.

I was surprised my wife didn't cry, but she was mopey.


Jimmy Jones is stupid enough.

Aw they hardly ever wake up mid-anesthesia!

You think that's bad, wait till the first time he goes to an evening HS football game unescorted by either parent. Whoa!

I cruised around the neighborhood all evening just because I couldn't stand waiting around in the house. :lol:


Hardly ever. :roflmao2:

Your dad sounds like a classy guy. :thumb:

Yep. He's done, in more ways than one.

So Johnny Football rides mountain bikes?

I'd take a chance on Vince Young before I gave Johnny Football another look. And I guess that is really saying something.

Johnny Football will land in prison.

New Yorker. Yelling is normal.

Once we went to my brother's wife's side of the family for Thanksgiving dinner. Lovely, kind people- social workers and school teachers and physical therapists.

Mr H leans over to me during dinner and whispers, "Why are they all yelling so much?"

Lol, I have to explain to him that no one is yelling. This is just NY volume. Long Island volume, actually. The rest of the state is not like that.

Dad was also a volatile Irish temperament. Pretty quick to get angry but mostly he liked for everyone to have a good time. However this football thing was extreme. If I recall, he thought the coach was an idiot. This was in the days before you could rewind, you were watching live on TV (although he did buy one of the expensive early VCRs to record the games as he watched them). So heaven forbid you should enter the room and briefly obstruct the view of the television! It was way preferable to me to otherwise occupy myself on a Sunday afternoon, the whole thing really did seem like an enormous waste of perfectly good weekend time to me.

I also grew up in a time when parents did not particularly modify what they were interested in to suit the preferences of their kids (a good thing IMO). If I wanted to plunk myself down in front of the tube and rave like a lunatic for 4 hours of the week, I would have been welcome. Otherwise, the message was: you're not the center of the universe, go occupy yourself. Fine by me.

Heck at least my father was modern by his family's standards- he thought women should be educated and eat at the table at the same time as men. His sisters did not get the same attitude from his father. The men ate first, the girls waited table and got the leftovers. And they only went to school as long as the state of NY required, no college education like my Dad got. Yeah there was some resentment over all that later in life. He was very old school poor Irish immigrant family though and became pretty enlightened considering his upbringing. Yelling at the TV was no biggie in that context. :)

Ha, I was being serious, and responding to the fact that he was a Giants fan. :)

And you haven't heard me at a football game... I wind up screaming myself into voicelessness for a day or two.

Speaking of yelling, you should have heard me during the last 8 seconds of this year's NCAA men's basketball finale. How many households didn't have yelling?

Omg, I just now noticed the Giants logo that is your avatar. How long have you had that?

My eyes really do glaze over when the subject turns to football, though. It really seems to me like something that should be illegal, with all the tackling and people getting injured. :)

Basketball is 100% different, that's a graceful sport to watch.

And that was an unbelievable finish!

Ha, wow. Been a few years, I think. Someone complained that I should have one, so after some thought I took inspiration from Billy and made mine. He was... not amused.

Wait till you put your 17-1/2 year old son on a train to basic training two weeks after high school graduation.

Going to daughter 1's wind ensemble concert this afternoon.

I asked her what is the difference between a band and a wind ensemble. She has no idea.

The triathlon road show is on the way home.

And then there's that.

If I thought that he was throwing away just fortune and fame, then I'd be right there with you in the "no sympathy" crowd. As it is, though, I think that his behavior is pointing towards a more extreme self-destruction. When the kid's parents say that they're afraid that he might not see his next b-day, it's hard for me to point and say, "ha ha! Sucks to be you!"