You got hurt how?!

I was playing soccer on Sunday morning and the team was doing well. We were passing the ball around, defending well, getting decent shots on net (which was really tiny, so the final score was only 3-1). What happened to me? Hell if I know. I took a shot at the goal from about 20 yards out—it wasn’t even a good shot—and when I landed, my right knee was displeased. That’s all. I called for a sub, limped off the field and bending that knee has hurt ever since.

It’s been an adventure trying to put on socks, sitting down on the toilet and getting into my car without hurting myself too much; I’m discovering new muscles that have been compensating for the ones I’m trying not to use; and I’m spending a lot of time “RICE”ing* my knee, but the worst part is simply how it happened. I shot the ball, I landed, ouch. No big collision, no battle scars, no decent story to go along with the limp. Just ouch.

In other news, I’ve been using some of my spare time to repost blog entries from years past. I was somewhere in the middle of September ’05 and have since moved up to February ’06. (Some people may be reading blog posts via RSS feed—since I’m editing the timestamp so the entries are appearing at the date when they were originally posted, you may or may not have been receiving said entries.) So it’s been… a while since I started shawnbakken.net and I’ve only caught up to the beginning of 2006 with the old stuff. At this rate, maybe I’ll have everything on here before the world ends in 2012.

There’s still about a week left of Movember and the MN Moustache Madmen and I are still accepting donations online, but I’m bending the rules slightly. In theory, we’re supposed to grow a mustache, but I opted for something a little less odd-looking and trimmed a week’s worth of growth down to a Van Dyke.

Three things:
1) The first person who makes a “Dick” joke in the comments section is getting punched in the groin.
2) You can follow the growth rate of my facial hair on my donation page, then check out Lance Armstrong’s efforts here. (Seriously, how could he be taking some kind of growth hormone if that’s all his upper lip can manage?)
3) I’m a tad depressed that I had my current style of facial hair during my senior year of high school, all through college and a few years beyond, but I’d always called it a goatee until I saw that website above. Sad, sad, sad…

That’s the scoop o’ the hour. If I don’t write another blog entry before then, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and, if nothing else, be thankful for the Internet connection that allows you to read my random blatherings. As for me, I’ll be much more thankful when it doesn’t take so much effort to use the toilet, ’cause if I’m lowering myself down by supporting my weight with my hands and one slips… I won’t want to tell people how I got those battle scars.

[*RICE = rest, ice, compression and elevation, not heat rice by rubbing it between your hands and then slap it against the injured area like Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid.]

Cancer is bad for your health

A friend of mine just told me about the Movember Foundation and recruited me for his Movember team, “MN Moustache Madmen”. I’m not sure how well that title applies to me now, but within the next 2+ weeks, it will: I’ll be growing out my facial hair intentionally to try to raise some donations, which will go towards the fight against cancer of the butts and nuts (a.k.a., prostate and testicular cancer).

So here’s my page if you want to make a donation or at least see how my upper lip is faring against the extra weight. (I’ll be posting pics there and on Myspace.) Since I’m starting from scratch now, I still have time to decide what style of facial hair I want to grow. I’m avoiding the porn ‘stache like the Plague, but if anyone has other suggestions, I’m sure plenty of butts and nuts out there would appreciate it.

I’m keeping an eye on you…

Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up on the new link at the bottom of the right column, “Site Meter”. I had a narcissistic urge to find out how popular I am (or at least how popular this blog is), so I’m using it as a web counter—in return, it’ll give me every statistic I could want: how many people visit the site, what time they visit, where they visit from, what they’re wearing when they visit… okay, maybe not every stat I could want, but close enough.

Fear not, faithful readers (all three of you as far as I know… but hopefully that’ll change). The service is free and may provide me with a little extra incentive (i.e., an occasional guilt trip) to write more often and satisfy your need for Shawn-created blog entries. Happy reading!

No, seriously, what are you going to do next?

I didn’t watch the World Series this year, so while I know the Yankees won, I’m not sure if there was a repeat performance of this sequence:

“You just won the World Series, what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to Disney World!”

I really hope people get paid to say that because it’d be just sad if part of an athlete’s dream would be to win a championship and then immediately jump on a plane so he could spend the next week at a commercially-overblown theme park. Personally, I think a more likely response would be something like this:

“I’m going home to have sex with my supermodel girlfriend!” or

“I’m gonna get drunk and plow my car into an embankment!” or

“I’m putting my steroids in the fridge so I can use them next season!”

Although now that I think about it, if you rent a car in Orlando and your hotel room at Disney has a bed and a refrigerator…

“I’m going to Disney World!”

My perfect costume

On Saturday, I attended a Halloween party at my friend Matthew Feeney’s house. (I’m always torn between his party and a Mensa gathering in Chicago called “HalloweeM”, but given my current lack of disposable income, it made my decision a little easier this year.) Matthew sends an invitation to a couple hundred people and averages about 150 visitors who drop by during the course of the night. The invite always states that costumes are encouraged, but not necessary. Thank God for that, because anyone who’s seen me at one of his parties knows the only “costume” I might wear is dressing up as a Geek.

This year, one of the other attendees was putting a little pressure on me to find a costume—she even offered to bring an extra that I could use that night—but I politely turned her down several times over. If I was really interested in dressing up, I’m sure I could think of something interesting. It was about eight years ago when I put together an outfit with a black shirt, a black tie, a black suit (alas, no fedora) and dyed my brown hair completely blond: I was dressed as a member of the Swedish Mafia.

So after said attendee kept needling me about wearing a costume, I told her that I could show up to the party as a Hollywood celebrity. It would have been pretty easy, really: all I’d have to do is dress up in whatever clothes I wanted and bring along a sense of entitlement. The only problem might have been that some people like to take pictures of the most creative costumes and I wouldn’t want to get into a fistfight with the paparazzi, so it’s probably best that I stuck with “costume not necessary” again this year.