Dear Brett,

So, you changed your mind and now you’re a Viking.  And you think your true fans will understand.  But before the season gets underway, there’s a thing or two we’d like to get off our chest.  We know you have time to read this since you tend not to want to spend a lot of time practicing anymore.

You say your legacy is your own whether we like it or not?  We disagree.  While no one can argue that your talents aren’t incredible and that your accomplishments aren’t amazing, we want to point out that you forgot something.  You forgot about us.  We were the ones who watched you every week from the stands and from our living rooms.

We were the ones watching when you completed your first pass as a Packer to yourself.

We were the ones watching when you and Reggie White and Mike Holmgren and so many others made it to the Super Bowl and brought the Lombardi Trophy home.

We were the ones who welcomed you home when you lost the next Super Bowl.  We were sad, but still proud of you and your teammates and still happy to be Packer fans.

We were the ones who didn’t judge you when you had personal issues, and defended your honor to lesser fans of the game.

We hated it when Holmgren left because we knew that could get in the way of you taking the Green and Gold back to the big game again and again.

We had heavy hearts and felt badly for you when your dad passed, and we knew and respected that every one of those 399 yards in Oakland on Monday Night were for him.

We cringed when you first mentioned retiring six years ago because we know that despite your record setting string of starts, all football careers eventually end.

You’ve made your choices, the Packers made theirs, and sadly you’re not with us anymore.   We know it doesn’t matter to you that it’s nearly impossible to be a Brett Favre fan when you’re sporting a purple jersey.  And we can’t predict if you will have wild success in Minneapolis or not.  But when the whistle blows, we don’t care. 

We are still, and will always be, Packer fans, win or lose.  We thought that meant something more to you than it obviously does, and that hurts.

Maybe it’s just a fan thing, but still, I have a feeling things won’t go for your team as planned.  Still, I hope you continue to enjoy the game. I hope the streak continues and you finish upright. I wish things were different. 

And let’s get one thing straight…

Don’t you dare deny our part in your legacy.  You were a hero — for our children, for our state, for so many of us.

You were a legacy because WE were there for you…

In other things, the Marquette basketball season has started and those games have been a blast so far.  So far we are averaging 100.5 points per game in our first 3 games and that is a huge number.  I realize that we really haven’t played any big name teams, but it feels good to come out of the gate with a stronger offense than we have had in a long time. 

The Packers are sucking it up and after last nights blowout, I am quickly losing faith in this teams ability to make the playoffs. No matter what I think about the Favre situation, this has been a tough season for the whole team and I’m really not sure if we would be any better or worse than we are now.  Tough to say.

Thanksgiving is coming up this week and I will be heading back to the parents place for a few days to relax, watch football, and eat like a king.  It should be nice to get away for a few days and not think about work.  In general I love this time of year, yeah the weather starts going to shit, but in general, everyone is in a good mood for the holidays and it tends to make working with people a little easier.  Well, that’s all I have for now. 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and don’t OD on the turkey…

So one day out of the year, we get to take off Monday, just to come back into work and have to make up for the day off by cramming 5 days of shit into a 4 day week. Now I’m not going to complain because I really like having the three-day weekend, but in general, it seems like people no longer are able to truly enjoy their vacations.

With the advent of the cell phone, wireless internet, and a bunch of other techno devices, we are no longer allowed to just get away… We are always reachable, always able to just log in for a few minutes and check up on things. I look at the work mentalitied of other countries and I’m at war with myself on whether they are all lazy bastards or if they are just that much smarter than us and able to rationalize that it’s “juts a job” and you need to have a defined seperation between work and home. I’d like to be able to take a year off and experience how life is treated in places like Italy, Spain, and Finland. Sure they get payed less, but in the end is their quality of life any lower? They might not have as many “toys” as we have, but in the end they are probably a lot happier at the end of the day. I’m really not sure where this post was going when I started writing, but apparently I have a train of thought that curves around like the model train under the Christmas Tree, always moving, but never really going anywhere… Happy Tuesday…

In short, I think that this movie makes it into my top 5 all time. For whatever reason, the movie just seems to be very sincere. The movie goes through the whole range of emotions, from humor to sorrow and anger. I have to say that I would never expect this kind of work from Billy Madison, but I highly suggest you take the time to sit down and watch it.

See ya in August…