Jodie never sleeps 'cause there are always needles in the hay she says that a girl needs a gun these days hey, on account of all the rattlesnakes she looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront as she reads Simone de Beauvoir, in her American circumstance her heart, heart's like crazy paving upside down and back to front she says "ooh, it's so hard to love when love was your great disappointment"

Contrary to the theme of my previous post, my weekend did manage to include non-soccer activities. One was the aforementioned BFD festival, discussed in more detail here. Another was the arrival of our newly hired gardeners on Sunday morning, who spent the day removing untold quantities of weeds from our front and back yards. At day's end, our 10 x 30' lawn had been reduced to a patch of dirt, ready for laying sod which will happen later this week. The assorted shrubs, trees, and hedges had also been beautified. Veronica has asked them to remove a collection of overgrown trees and hedges from our back yard, which they will tackle next weekend. We had to check with the city as apparently we need a permit to remove certain kinds of trees, but luckily our foliage doesn't fall under the governmental protection. When it came time to pay our crew, we got the nasty surprise that we were out of checks ... luckily Veronica made a quick trip to the ATM and was able to get out enough to cover the day's work.

I've also been playing a lot of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter lately. What a fabulous game. The joy of organizing a raid on an unsuspecting enemy force is unparalleled ... sneaking through the brush, creeping along an enbankment, sending your squad to flank the enemy, then bursting in on them from two directions and mowing them down with automatic fire. Or locating an enemy on your tracking system using your reconaissance drone, then crawling to a sniper point and picking them off using night vision. Really, really well done. The killer app for the Xbox 360 to date, no doubt. I'm also playing a bit of FIFA World Cup 2006, but that's mostly to get my video soccer fix. It's no Winning Eleven, not even close. Hopefully Konami will release a 360 version of that in the near future ... IGN has it listed, but not due for release in the US until January 2007.

Allergies have been a royal pain in the ass for me so far this summer. I've never fallen victim to them in any major way before, except for my well-known sensitivity to cats. I'm wondering if the lack of a proper spring this year, given the continual rain from February through May, has increased the amount of pollen in the air in this early summer. The dust Veronica and i have been kicking up at home through our cleaning efforts is also having its way with me. Tara's rampant fur isn't helping either. Claritin helps, but only slightly. Now i know what my mom and sister were suffering with all those years growing up.

Only five shopping days left ...