Ok, so the Cougs took a beating. It was obvious that Auburn was the better team, and that our defense was overmatched. I kind of expected it. I see the game as a positive, though. Point one is that we're better than last year, especially in the defensive secondary. True, Auburn broke off 10+ yard running plays at will, but that was true last year, too. Unlike last year, though, the cornerbacks didn't give up an embarrassing number of big play touchdown passes (their longest pass play came on a coverage mix-up). Also, I don't think most PAC-10 teams will have offensive lines as talented as Auburn's. On the offensive side, Brink still showed no ability to go over the middle for more than 10 yards. He did, however, rediscover his penchant for throwing long E-W passes that are intercepted at inopportune times. Will the Cougs win the PAC-10? No. Can they give any team in the PAC-10 a run for their money? I think so. Can they beat a resurgent, Dennis Erickson-led Idaho? Only time will tell.

Upon discovering that Kai had taken a 1/4 full container of Krispy Rice and spread it over the living room floor, I was left to ponder the various categories of messes that can and do exist in our house:

1. The easy mess - the Krispy Rice falls into this category. It looks kinda bad, but just grabbing the vacuum and wheeling it around in the general area does the trick. It's so easy, it feels like a vacuum cleaner demo. It takes longer to wind up the cord than it does to clean up the mess.

2. The kid-ok mess - this is one where, for some reason, the kid who made the mess is able to clean it up when commanded to do so. An example from our house would be the play-dough set or the duplos. Having a container specific to the items creating the mess is obviously key.

3. The 1hr 15min mess - When we have people over to our house, it is always in an unpresentable state until we give it a thorough clean-up. This will always take us about 1hr and 15 minutes. We pick up all the stuff, vacuum the floors, and clean the bathrooms (chief among all social faux pas is allowing guests to use a bathroom which shows any signs of having ever been used for activities that bathrooms normally accomodate). This usually takes about 75 min. After the guests leave, the house usually still looks nice - a fringe benefit of having people over.

4. The "Rome wasn't cleaned in a day" mess - This is a type of mess that can't be tackled in one or two attempts. It must be gradually beaten into submission by 10 or 15 sessions. Because of this, such messes are best housed in non-public, low-traffic areas. For us, this area would be the garage. Our garage is actually doing ok at this point, and we are glad we saved the cardboard boxes from our move here because we're gonna be moving again.

5. The "I will never forget this mess" mess - This kind of mess will forever be burned into our psyches, and cannot be revisited without groans of digust. One such mess would be the time when we spilled a 2 gallon container of Kirkland liquid laundry detergent in the kid's bathroom of our Philadelphia apartment. Somehow the jug, which had been sitting on the sink, fell to the floor, cracking the cap on one of its spouts. The stickly liquid oozed and spread over the entire bathroom floor. In its super-concentrated form, the detergent was nearly impossible to clean up. Washing the detergent-soaked towels out in the sink just made huge mounds of suds, and they didn't pick up much of the stuff to begin with. I finally fashioned a makeshift squeegee out of a flexible plastic folder-cover, and scraped the offending material off the floor. The bathroom did always smell good after that. For mom, a certain honey container in the grinder room comes to mind.

Ok, that's enough. Work is still great, but my company is constantly reorganizing and changing itself. To that end, 2 businesses (one of which I work for) are being combined, and I'm not sure I'll be able to keep working for the boss I have now. That would be really disappointing - he's the kind of guy I love working for, and I have a lot to learn from him. We'll see how it goes.