Your 2007 National League Central Champs!!

Cubs Playoff parties at el Casa de Martin for each Cubs playoff game.

It's Gonna Happen!

I don't know where to start. There's only one week left in the season and the Cubs are up 3.5 games over the Milwaukee Brewers after today's action.

I'm stoked. Look, I know if the Cubs were in any other division in baseball they'd be in third place at best. But let's not get bogged down in details here. The fact of the matter is the Cubs are any combination of four wins or four Brewer losses from being in the playoffs for the first time since 2003.

I'm already expecting to miss quite a bit of sleep during the month of October. Sure, my grades will probably suffer, my work won't be very good, I'll be miserable to be around and on edge all the time, I'll develop an unhealthy dependency on caffine and be insufferable, but that's a small price to pay to stay up late watching the team I've followed for 20 years have a chance to do something they haven't done in almost 100 years.

I haven't written a lot about the team this year for fear that I might jinx the good thing that was happening. (And at this point, I do believe in curses, fate and all that crap. I'm going all Earl Hickey and trying to collect as much good karma as possible. I'm letting people out in traffic, holding open doors for people 20 to 25 feet from even getting there. Waitresses that normally wouldn't get a decent tip are getting 25 percent and I'm apologizing for things I know aren't my fault to just to try to keep karma on my side. (After a century without a title, I'd confess to the Abe Lincoln shooting if I thought it would help. Note to any federal agents: I wasn't born when Lincoln was killed, no need to investigate me.)

The problem with living in South Georgia is that I'm surrounded by Braves fans, so there's no one here to share my joy and passion. There's a guy in my class who's a Phillies fan and a guy at work who is a Mets fan. My boss is a White Sox fan, so he'd rather the world end than have the Cubs win. So I'm forced to share my joy with you, whoever happens to stop by here.

More to come as the Cubs get closer to the playoffs.

A little help from my friends

Hello again everyone.

I come to you needing help. At work, we're having our own little "World Series of Pop Culture" and half the fun of the tournament will be coming up with a team name. My teammates and I haven't been able to come up with anything yet, though I'm disappointed they rejected my suggestion of "Ferris and Sloane's Illegitimate Love Children."

So now I'm turning to you for suggestions. I can't promise any of will be selected, but I'd love to see what ideas you come up with.

For those of you scoring at home, or even if you're by yourself

Sometimes you see something and you know you just have to have it. For me, it was the shirt to the right.

As a baseball fan, I care about second base. As a male, I definitely care about second base. So when I saw a story about this shirt (and organization) in Newsweek, I thought it was both a great cause and a really clever slogan.

So now Yes Dear has the shirt, and I can feel good that I've done my part to help fight breast cancer, or as I'll refer to it from now on, saving second base.

I also enjoyed the thank you card accompanying the shirt that had a picture of pink bra and the words "thank you for your support."

Should I be concerned?

So school is in full swing, keeping me busy, but it's a good busy. I'd forgotten just how much fun it is to go to class and learn something new or have things you kind of knew put in their proper terms. While working at a newspaper wasn't exactly mindless work, there was a lot of less-than-exciting work that eventually became so routine that I got bored with it.

There's only so many ways you can write a story and after almost five years, I'd pretty much reached my limit of ways to tell the same story, so it was good for me to get away and back into an academic setting, which I find I really enjoy.

But with school and two part-time jobs (school's much harder when you have a mortgage to worry about) comes a lot of time apart from Yes Dear. Even though she works at the RAC (the rec. center on campus where I'm doing my graduate assistantship), we don't see each other much.

I wasn't too concerned about that to begin with. After all, when she went back to get her Master's Degree, I pretty much went an entire semester only seeing her walk home from class and go to the computer room to work on her thesis.

But shortly after school started, I noticed something different with Yes Dear. She'd leave for about an hour and then, when she came home, she'd be all hot and sweaty. No real cause for concern, after all, she did work at a gym. But soon I learned some disturbing news.

She'd been going to meet a college guy. It started out just once a week, but now it's up to twice a week. She always puts on special clothes and goes to meet him. When she comes home, she's always hot and sweaty and telling me how hard things were.

Making matters worse, she was paying this gentleman cold, hard, cash to go see him. He, too, worked at the RAC and had the audacity to say hello to me and even act like my friend.

Could it be? Could my wife be cheating on me right under my nose?

Well, no, she just hired a personal trainer to keep her motivated and accountable to someone to work out. But that's a boring blog post, so I went for the cheap, tawdry story-telling approach in the hopes you would keep reading.

By the way, in case your curious, she's doing well with her trainer and enjoying it (after the fact, she's not really thrilled during the actual training.)