NC State baseball is right around the corner with 10 days to go before our opening game on February 9th. Pre-season rankings have us at 28th, which is a good place to be. On the map, but with plenty of room to move up. We only have three starters in the field left from last years team so the real question mark is how good will we be offensively and defensively. We are set to have great pitching, led off by Andrew Brackman who has been ranked as a pre-season 1st team all American. Since great pitching makes for a good team, it should be a fun season for baseball this year.

For football word is just in that we have a commit from Germany for defense, and from the article it seems he will be pretty exciting to watch. Here is another article concerning football commitments for NC State, UNC, and Duke. NC States schedule has been set and I am really looking forward to seeing how next season will play out. Two out of conference games that should be good, Louisville in Raleigh, and ECU at ECU. If we are doing well, a win over a highly ranked Louisville on a Thursday night on ESPN could get some attention, and a win over ECU at ECU will be very satisfying after getting clobbered by them this year. Should be an exciting season.

I took this picture back in September on a backpacking trip to Linville Gorge and posted it here, but I never looked at it in high resolution until this week when I made it my wallpaper. Upon closer inspection you can see a tiny spider on the flower that is so small its legs are clear. In real life the flower is about half an inch across, so the spiders leg span can’t be more then an 8th of an inch. I certainly didn’t notice the spider when I was taking a picture, but what a perfect shot!

Simply amazing, the courage and strength of mind of both people.  “Hey honey, there is a pen in my right pocket… can you take it out and stab this mountain lion that is eating me in the eye?  Thanks so much.”

I found this blog at GetOutdoors to be very interesting. Watching the two minute history of snowboarding and seeing things like this come out, its kind of neat to see just how young snowboarding is, and its nice to see there is still room for innovation. Click on the picture below to open it up full size and check out the details of this new thinking. I would not be at all surprised if all snowboards soon adopted this thinking.

After reaching an initial agreement with JD Drew for 5 years $70 million, the Red Sox did a physical on Drew and that has held up negotiations for 7 weeks now. The good news is that finally the deal is done and everything is agreed to. The big change that came about by the delay is that if Drew has problems with his shoulder in the next three years then the Red Sox can opt out of the last two years of his contract, making the contract only three years $42 million.

My biggest fear with Drew was that he would be hurt a lot and signing a five year contract with someone like that is risky. However Drew now has a great reason to not miss games and if he does then the Red Sox haven’t lost so much.

I think that he will do well in Boston because he is hitting behind Manny and Ortiz and he doesn’t need to replace either of them. As long as Drew is healthy I think he will do a fine job replacing Nixon in right field and Varitek in the fifth spot in the rotation. If he gets hurt we have a good fourth outfielder in Willy Mo. Win win.

According to accuscore the Colts win the super bowl by about 3 points and both teams score in the 20s.  The only hope they give the Bears is if their special teams comes through big time.

Amazingly Google has done it again. They have given Google groups a make over and turned it into an extremely useful tool for any group. It now provides way more then just a news group. It provides a home page that would serve very well for most groups. It also allows members of the group to create other pages that are linked to from the home page, and there is a folder where group files such as pictures can be uploaded and quickly accessed. Here is a tour that Google provides.

I tried out some of the features with the Next Gen Men group that I am a member of and uploaded the pictures from Saturday mornings habitat project and added a very brief report of the project as a page. Pretty neat. Its very easy to maneuver around, is very well organized, and looks great.

UPDATE: All this weeks its been freezing temperatures in Western NC and they are getting some snow, so they are finally able to open up new trails. Today Beech opened up two more intermediate trails so they now have 9 open. By next week I wouldn’t be surprised if the resorts are able to open everything up.

I have been keeping an eye on the ski resorts around NC, VA, and WV, to see if they are finally getting snow, and here is my official snow report:

• Beech Mountain, NC still only has one intermediate line from the top to the bottom, but it just opened up Oz run on the back of the mountain which is intermediate and is a pretty good run. Thats the run that I learned how to carve on, so if you want to learn to snowboard, beech would be ideal right now. The nice thing about beech is that it has a plethora of lifts to the top so none of them get too crowded. 7 of 15 trails open, 0 black diamonds.
• Sugar Mountain, NC is almost entirely open except for a black diamond and a few connecting trails and the terrain park. Two of its three black diamonds are open. The problem with sugar is that the entire mountain is serviced by one lift and its not even a high speed quad, its a dinky two seater (there is a second lift but I haven’t seen them use it yet this year). It has the longest runs from top to bottom but also the longest lines. 16 of 20 trails open, 2 black diamonds.
• Winterplace, WV has about half of its trails open, including one black diamond. Their lines are never too bad, and the trails that are open are spread all over the mountain so that no one lift should be overworked too terribly. 16 of 28 trails open, 1 black diamond.
• Snowshoe Mountain, WV has almost as many trails as sugar, beech, and winterplace combined, and almost all of them are open. The only trails closed are some of the black diamonds and a few out of the way connector trails. The only negative about snowshoe is that it is the most expensive of the four places, but it also has the most trails, so you get what you pay for. 44 of 57 trails open, 4 black diamonds.

We had another habitat for humanity Saturday morning with the guys from church and enjoyed it very much. We had six people and we were able to work on several different projects. We started out doing sheet rock indoors, but there were a lot of Elon volunteers there and it was too crowded so we went outside and worked on the fascia of the house and a deck and wheel chair ramp. Here are some pics:

We were up early for some Biscuitville and I got to see the sun rise. I thought these pictures turned out really nice.

On the left is Kevin and our boss putting up the fascia and on the right is John and Karissa and James.

Kevin measuring and marking boards for the deck,

Karissa goofing off with the boards,

me cutting the boards,

and Tom assuming a management position over the board cutting process.

We were done by lunchtime and headed over the Martino’s for a bite, and then out to Mill Creek for some football with a bunch of others. Overall a Saturday very well spent.

http://www.slate.com/id/2157741/

Oh yeah for you girls disappointed that you cant try out to play for the LA Galaxy, here is your shot to get a piece of the MLS action: Try out to be on the dance team for the Carolina Railhawks