Honor Roll Ceremony

This morning we joined Madison for her first Honor Roll Ceremony.  She got straight A's last semester, so she was recognized for her good grades along with the other students at the school.  It was a brief ceremony, and yet another one with a free chicken nugget card to a local McDonald's.  Madison now has three of these.  Obviously, the greater thing is the certificate you see her holding above.  She sat in the front, and despite being a bit under the weather, she was all smiles to be a part of this ceremony.

As mentioned earlier, she's a bit under the weather.  There is no fever, but there's some drainage and coughing.  This is going around, although Daddy and Mommy seem to be doing okay lately.

It was Monday, so we had a full day afterwards with jazz and ballet.  Daddy has been writing for the new Neverland series, and also some superhero devotional stuff.  Meanwhile, there's plenty of housework to do as well.  It's just been a busy sort of day!

We continued our Tinkathon with a shorter movie, "The Pixie Hollow Games."  We've really been getting into these Tinkerbell movies lately - but we've only got two left.  We don't see if they're making another one right now, so this could be it.  But they've been fun to watch.  Of course, we're reading too.  Tonight, we read into some tricky territory, about Dinah and her vengeful brothers.  Talk about overkill.  After that, we continued the story of "The Coming Storm," with Jack Sparrow.  We only have a few more chapters in this book - they read very quickly.  Still, Madison got about twelve of these books for Christmas, so we have eleven more to go after this one.  Yes, we're in this one for the long haul.  Coincidentally, there's a new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie coming out soon, one that has a new trailer that just came out yesterday.  Yes, we'll be all out for seeing that in a few months.  Lots of new movies are coming out soon, including a new LEGO movie this weekend.

This is Blue Falcon.  He and Dynomutt were some of Daddy's cartoon favorites growing up.  Each Saturday morning, you could catch them battling crime.  Dynomutt was somewhat of a robotic Scooby Doo.  But Blue Falcon, he was sort of like Batman, only blue.  And a falcon. 

Today, we are in the land of the blue Falcons.  See what I did there?  There is this huge depression that has sunk in to the land of Georgia, a place where sports teams can rise up, but not that much.  We are an elite city, up there with Buffalo and San Diego as the biggest losers in the sporting world.  Sure, Chicago Cubs have just won a World Series, the first for them in over a hundred years.  But the people of Chicago had the Bulls in the 90's, the White Sox last decade, the Bears in the 80's, and their NHL team winning in 2013.  So the people of Chicago should stop whining, big time.  Oh, poor you.  Like we're seriously supposed to feel sorry for you?  Look, we're from Atlanta, and when it comes to hopelessness and futility, we own you!

Let's look at the stats again for Atlanta's big wins.  ONE.  Atlanta has had one sports championship in 1995.  One.  Since 1965 we've only been to the Super Bowl twice, and lost both times.  With baseball, we've been to the World Series five times.  We've lost four of those.  That's sixteen more losses (it takes losing four games to lose a World Series).  I vividly remember watching all those games.  

Moving on to the NBA:  The Atlanta Hawks have never even been to a championship.  And the NHL team, the Thrashers, didn't stay long enough to make it to one either.  The point is, this city is cursed.  It's clear as day if you watched the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl last night.  One team was anointed with awful, and there's only one explanation for it:  that team was from Georgia.  What's interesting is that there was a bit of hope for a while, and even a feeling like, yeah, they can do it.  They can win.  There's the lure that draws all of us older dreamers back into the trap, alongside the newbies.  Everyone forgets the basic rule:  teams from Georgia can't win the big games.  

We're all hardened, cynical fans, without any hope. Because once you get your hopes up, they're crushed time and again.  That's what happened in the nineties, what conditioned most of us.  And now I pity this new generation of fans coming up, these dreamers that think that we just need faith.  No, we've had faith time and again.  We're just tired of getting our hopes up, having seen them rise to such amazing heights, and then watch what happened last night.

So it seems kind of cold-hearted advice here, and maybe you just have to take it with the context of the biggest most brutal loss of them all, but never expect that much from a sports team from Georgia.