ronskidog

Since this a sports site and most people like discussing sports I thought it would be different to talk about the sports or games you do for fun.  This is not to recap your glory days of high school but to discuss what sports you are currently active in.  This is also not a forum to argue about what is a sport but a place to celebrate the activities we do for fun.  Most people here like to brag about their favorite team or favorite player.  This is your chance to brag about your athletic prowess or your golf game.

As you guessed from my name I like to ski.  I don’t downhill ski anymore but I go back country skiing with my dogs.  We have an unusually long ski season so I start skiing just after Halloween and ski until the middle of May or June. I also take the dogs hiking in the mountains, usually where there is water so I don’t have to pack water for them.  We also take them swimming on hot summer days and they love to play fetch in the water.  Other sports I do occasionally:

River canoeing on class II or III rivers.  There aren’t any good rivers close to home so I usually go when I’m on vacation.

Windsurfing.  I only go a couple of times a year because of the intermittent summer winds and frequent out of town work.

Bicycling.  I used to go on long road rides and mountain biking but lately I’ve been riding on the local recreational trails.

Bowling.  Once in a great while when the whim hits.

I would like to play team sports such as softball and volleyball but my work schedule has never allowed it.  I would also like to own either a wave runner or sailboat but access to the boat ramps at the local lakes is too restrictive (2 hour wait on summer weekends).

So what does my fellow CBS posters do when they pry their fingers from the keyboard and free themselves from the confines of work and home?

 

 

 

    This past holiday I decided to redeem my airline miles and fly back east to visit my family for the holidays.  Flying during the holiday season can be a sketchy proposition with bad weather and overcrowded flights so I planned accordingly and flew on less traveled weekdays.
    The first part of my trip on Friday December 19 included a flight from Denver to Chicago (O’Hare), a two hour lay-over in Chicago, and a flight from Chicago to Albany, NY.  The first leg of my trip was relatively uneventful except that we were 20 minutes late taking off from Denver but we made up the time in the air.
    When I got to Chicago I located my next gate which was on the other end of the large airport.  I still had time to kill so I opted for lunch and a beer at Chili’s.  The restaurant was crowded and since I was by myself the hostess seated me at the bar next to a guy who was wearing a Denver Broncos jersey.  I was wearing a Broncos sweatshirt so we struck up a conversation.  He had grown up in Colorado but was living in Virginia.  He was flying to Kansas City to visit some friends who were Chiefs fans and had bought the Broncos jersey to piss them off.  The guy on the other side of him mentioned that he had gone to Colorado State University.  He was living in Chicago and was flying to Newark.  When I was halfway through my burger the other two guys got calls from the airline informing them their flights had been canceled.  I hurriedly choked down the rest of my burger so I could check the board for the status of my flight.
    When I got to the board it was lit up like a Christmas tree with numerous flights canceled including mine and a few more that were delayed.  I started to panic as didn’t want to be stuck in one of the busiest airports in the country on the busiest travel weekend of the year.  I made my way to the end of the long customer service line.  The people in front of me and behind me were all trying to get to Pennsylvania and were considering teaming up and renting a car.  Driving wasn’t an option for me as it would have been a 16 hour drive on good roads and more snow was predicted for the weekend.  I could see the weather radar on the television screen above the desk and New York, Pennsylvania, and western New England were one huge blue blob.  When I finally got to the customer service desk over an hour later they informed me that there we two later flights to Albany but they were booked full.  I asked them when they could get me a guaranteed seat on a flight and they replied Sunday night.  My heart sank and I think the customer service representative noticed because she then asked me if she could fly me somewhere else.  I briefly thought about it and responded “New York City, Boston, or Syracuse.”  She searched on her computer and told me she could get me on a flight to La Guardia airport (NYC) in half an hour.  It took me less than a second to reply “Just do it.”
    I made the plane and felt good about my decision.  New York City to Albany is basically a long commuter route with regular bus and train service.  It was close enough that I could rent a car and drive the 3 hours to Albany or 4 hours to my mom’s house.  On the flight I was considering renting a car and driving as soon as we landed.   When we made the approach into New York I quickly changed my mind.  I could see the fresh snow and didn’t want to be driving strange roads at night during bad weather.  We landed safely amid all the snowplows and snow removal equipment and pulled up to the gate.  All of the people in a hurry to get nowhere naturally stood up and gathered their belongings.  After five or ten minutes the captain informed us that they were having problems moving the jet-way up to the plane so we would be waiting for them to fix it.  After thirty minutes he informed us that they had fixed the jet-way so we could finally exit the plane.
    By then it was 9:30 pm so I opted to get a hotel room.  After I got to the hotel I looked up the bus schedule and decided on a 10:00 bus the next day.  Saturday I took the hotel shuttle back to the airport, caught a cab to the bus terminal, rode the bus to the Albany bus terminal, transferred to another bus to take me to Albany airport where I recovered my checked luggage and got picked up by my family.
    My adventures were not quite over.  On the return trip, when I arrived at Albany airport, I found that there were two flights leaving for Chicago at the same time at adjacent gates.  I found that the other flight had been delayed 10 hours.  When they started boarding the planes there was much confusion about which plane people were supposed to board (even though the attendants were very clear in their boarding instructions.)  We finally boarded the plane and waited.  The pilot stated that our flight and the flight next to us were having mechanical problems and that our plane was repaired, but we were waiting for the mechanics, who were working on the other plane, to come over and sign off on our repairs.  We finally took off an hour late.
      I was only going to have a 40 minute layover in Chicago and with us being an hour late I missed my connection to Denver.  Upon arriving in Chicago I found a self –help kiosk and booked a flight to Denver the following morning.  I found a hotel room and arrived back in Denver at noon the following day.
    I’m glad that I don’t usually fly during in the winter and during the holidays and I’ll think twice before I do it again.  FYI the family is doing fine and I will travel east to see them again.

I am writing this blog because I witnessed firsthand JudgementDay’s (hereon referred to as JD) self destruction.  I didn’t know him that well, just well enough to know he was a well respected poster.

I logged on late Friday night and noticed JD had posted a thread titled “Help me get banned”.  This aroused my curiosity so I decided to check it out.  JD wrote that he was trying to get himself banned but CBS wouldn’t cooperate so he posted this thread asking other posters to warn him so he could get banned.  He filled every post with profanity and insults to the other posters on the thread so it was obvious he was serious about it.  I turned to page 2 of the thread and found all his posts had been deleted.  I then went to check his profile and it was gone.

I have heard other posters classify JD as crazy or nuts but it was obvious he held their respect.  I would classify him as cultured and borderline eccentric.  JD was intelligent and educated.  Some of his posts would challenge your intelligence.

One can only wonder why JD chose to sever ties with this board.  I noticed that earlier in the week he suggested he would be leaving us for a while.  The real irony is not the tragic way that JD went out, but that he was sporting his John Belushi avatar when he did.  Fare Thee Well JD!

The following letter was sent by e-mail from a friend with whom I share jokes, photos, and videos. I don't know who the the original author was.  I am not a military or political person.  I decided to share it with you because it paints a vivid and colorful picture of what seems to be a forgotten war in Afghanistan.
 

"Eloquent U.S. Marine (in a manner of speaking!)

 

This is from a Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan

 

It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar 'yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

 

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard.

 

The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

 

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware, we bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.

 

It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.

 

I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me. I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.

 

Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

 

I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins for over a month and a half now and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of ?em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do.

 

They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.

 

 

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.

 

Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.

 

They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

 

OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice but I'm good at it. Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives.

 

The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here because you have no idea what we're doing and, really, you don't want to know. We are your military and we are doing what you sent us here to do.

 

You wanna help? Buy Bonds America.

 

Saucy Jack 

Semper Fidelis "