I’m still not very good at this, but at least I managed to catch a little bit of Brit scoring two of her three goals today.

And Moneyball makes ten. A worthy tenth.

Had Five Guys for the first time. Not as good as the hype. In and Out still tops.

P.S. All good down South.

8:00am: I have eaten my last meal until sometime after 12pm tomorrow. I am scheduled to be probed at 10:30am tomorrow morning. At 10am today, I will begin a regimen that is to completely rid my body of oysters and western bacon cheeseburgers. When I met with the doc on Tuesday, he said my blood pressure was high and he may not be able to put me under for the procedure if it remains the same. The thought of completing this prep for naught is raising my blood pressure as I write. P.S. My insurance won’t cover any of this, so I’m paying $2000 for the pleasure.

10:00am I just pounded a bottle of Magnesium citrate. Disgustingly sweet, but not too hard. You know, I really don’t think I have a whole lot in my system to give. Had a couple of pieces of Pizza for dinner last night and some cream of wheat for breakfast. Other than being cancer free I’m hoping to lose a few lbs and jumpstart a downward cycle. For the record I’m weighing in at 177lbs.

11:45am: 15mgs of Dulcolax. I have a steel stomach.

2:00pm: Time for the cruelest part. Miralax. The directions call for 17 grams per dose. The doc said I need to take 296 grams.

3:25pm: Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire comes to mind

5:19pm: Hungry!

8:51pm: Raw

Saw Unknown. Decent thriller. Something I would’ve written in four weeks back in the day.

I figured I owed a moment of silence to the man. We were the first on the block to have an Apple IIe home computer. I was never able to get it to do much more than add numbers. Many years later, Steve Jobs was lured back to Apple after selling Pixar to Disney and figured out how to extract every last penny in my bank account for products I thought I couldn’t live without. We bought Devin the first iPod on the day it was released. We then bought every iPod thereafter. We bought iMac computers, MacBooks, Macbook Airs and more software than we needed. We used the iPads to sell our clothing line at trade shows. We stood in line for six hours to buy the iPhone, iPhone 2 & iPhone 3S. We actually waited a couple of days to buy the iPhone 4, but not for lack of want. Bottom line… If someone isn’t there to take the torch and run with it, I may just save enough money to retire one day.

90 degrees last week, but tonight, we’re having our first fire.

Love, Your Favorite Uncle

I bought a video camera to record Brit playing soccer, but every time she had the ball the camera would fall to my side while I watched. A good videographer is never invested in the subject. Anyway, the only footage I got of her was at the tail end of this video. She scored her longest goal, but I only caught it half way to the goal before I cut off the camera.

After two months of try outs and psychological warfare from her High School soccer coach, Brittany was singled out at the end of practice yesterday and was welcomed as the first, and so far only, selection to the varsity team.

Another set of styles added to our line sheets. If you want to check out Sonia’s latest designs, click here

Username: basicallyme

Password: newstyles

Happy 1st Birthday to future Hall of Famer, Roberto Lucey. Speaking of birthdays, our friend Tomiko should be giving birth right about now to her son.

Brunch at the historic Brennan’s in the French Quarter.

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Birthplace of the Bananas Foster

We toured the Katrina battered lower ninth ward and found abandoned neighborhoods frozen in time.

Night One in The Big Easy.

We hired a new employee to handle all of our Basically Me shipping and customer service. It would be nice if the State and Feds wouldn’t punish us for doing so, but I guess that’s crazy talk.

Love watching Lincecum pitch. Hate watching the Giants lose. Dodger Stadium is done. Time to blow it up and move downtown.

Had a great dinner at Rivera with clients. There was just as much beef and vegetables in my drink than on my plate.

Sunday’s game may have just been the type of game Brit’s team needed. With only one sub on the bench, Brit’s team was down 2-0 in the first half. It was hot as Hell and they were clearly tired, but they never gave up. Brit finally scored in the 80th minute. However, it remained bleak until the final minute of the game when one of Brit’s teammates was fouled in the box and made the PK to tie.

Brit’s team bounced back from last week’s loss in a big way and creamed one of the better teams in the league, 4-1. Despite being double and tripled teamed, Brit scored all four goals, including a couple of headers.

A couple of days of interviews are scheduled to find our next team member.

Today was the launch of Missoni for Target. Sonia was up at 4am to order online and fought multiple website crashes before finally persevering. She also went to Target this morning at 8am to see what she could get. At 8:03am, everything was gone. Branding is an amazing thing. In some ways, we’re trying to become the Missoni of the South.

They’re making another movie based on The Great Gatsby, so I figured I’d give it another read. It holds up surprisingly well.

Breakfast burrito digesting. NFL ticket on the TV. Sonia’s chili cooking on the stove. Hoping for a 50% work free Sunday. So far, so good.

Brit’s team lost the first game of the new Gold level season. They led 1-0 going into the second half, but lost 1-3. It looks like it’s all about the subs at this level.

Another successful photoshoot in the books.

Because we’re currently dealing with a company financial crisis, we decided to celebrate “Fashion Night Out” on Rodeo Drive and spend money we currently don’t have.

This is how honors students do their homework nowadays.

It took two overtimes and a second round of the penalty kick shoot out to break the 0-0 tie, but once again Brit’s team came out on the losing end. Nevertheless, she’s over it and ready for the season to begin next weekend.

My mom’s dog, Shelby, approves of the pool.

BBQ & Pool with my Mom, Jim, Sean, Kim and the twins.

Playing their last tournament before the gold season begins next weekend, Brit’s team has looked great. They won both games, 6-0 and 3-0 and look to make it to the finals on Sunday. Brit seems to have shaken off her Achilles tendonitis and scored three.

We took my Mom and Jim to the Taste of LA “Burgers & Beer” event. We tried way too many burgers from the city’s best restaurants.

I finally gave my Aunt Ona’s greatest book collection a home.

We took over the space next door to house our growing inventory. We hope that it will help alleviate the daily shipping headaches we seem to be having. For instance, we just discovered that twenty seven orders were charged from last week, but did not get boxed and shipped. So, the only thing to do was to next day air a few hundred pounds of orders which wiped out all profits on the batch.

Last night I was entering an order around 12:15am and told Sonia, I’m done for today because I have a lot of work to do today. Somewhere around that time it became clear to me that I hate my job. Because of this I am now focused on my exit strategy. I need to work harder to put this company in a position to offer me a golden parachute. Two years or bust.

It’s midnight and she’s still going strong. Junior year is turning out to be a tough load to carry. Brit starts school at 7am and ends at 2:30pm. She then has high school soccer practice until 5pm. And then there’s club practice from 7:30pm to 9pm on Tuesdays and Thursday. It’s been hard to fit in all of that homework. She also managed to knock off number 99 by joining the fashion club and the breast cancer awareness club. Both family influences I guess.

No TV in the bedroom leads to more books read or more babies. I’m reading more books.

Finally, one hour of free time on the yard. If I keep my nose clean, the warden has promised another hour next weekend.

Burbank only allows food trucks on the last Friday of every month. I’m not waiting an hour for a grilled cheese.

Come on, Irene! We have enough road blocks to deal with. Leave our customers alone.

We’re officially drowning in production. #6 was officially knocked off a month or two ago, but now we’re forced to expand a little sooner than we would’ve liked.

There is only one eye sore on our street and it just happens to be our neighbor. I couldn’t take a very good picture because I didn’t want them to see me. However, their yard probably accounts for $50,000 of lost property value for us, so I’ll probably get meaner as time goes by.

Twenty trips to Home Depot later, we completed a few projects.

We painted the front door a dark red.

We Painted

Before

After. We opted for silver and grey/blue tones.

We opened up the wall between the living room and dining room.

Our biggest project outside of wiring the house for audio and video. It’s not the best before picture, but we opened it up about 32 inches wider and a 6 inches higher.

Who would have the gumption to host a party three days after they moved in?

Because we couldn’t just move in and enjoy the place for awhile, we decided to tackle a few projects right off the bat. The first was painting. The second and third more ambitious jobs were opening up the wall between the dining room and living room and wiring the house for rock stadium quality audio and video. We hired a guy our former landlord recommended to do the painting and wall. After five days of horrible work and shady comings and goings, we fired him. Turns out he was our landlord’s salsa instructor and had no business doing the work we asked. Devin and his girlfriend pitched in to help paint and we hired a reputable floor guy to finish the wall job. Sean provided a crew to do the audio and video work, but a few snags have prevented me from watching TV. Still don’t miss it. Pics of the finished jobs are coming soon.

It’s been 8 Days, 3 hours, 5 minutes and 36 seconds without TV. Nevertheless, I’m not missing it. Although I did buy another TV today, so go figure. It’s 9pm and what is suppose to be the final install is not going so smoothly for the crew. Maybe I’ll get another twenty four without the boob tube.

It may be a bit of a disaster zone, but at least it’s our disaster zone. For the very first time, Sonia and I slept in our own bed in our own house.