We’ve played Memphis 8 times in our 10 years of D1 Football.
We’re 6-2 in that series with all 6 wins coming in the last 6 years.
We hope to make it 7 in a row this weekend (we seem to have Memphis’s number, much like Southern Miss has ours, and Memphis has Southern Miss’s).
Well, a few creative Blazer fans had an idea to start a tradition (as we often have to do with a Football team as young as ours is), and they sent a few emails to some people in the UAB athletic department.
A few more calls were made to some local artisans over at Sloss Furnaces, and they put together a little 100lb cast iron slab of ribs that the winner of the Football game gets to take home with them…
Then a few more calls were made and a few big names in BBQ from both Memphis and Birmingham decided to show up and hold a little competition for who can kick out the best in smoked pork…
Confirmed to be there are
Full Moon
Dreamland
Two Brothers
Buffalo Rock
The competition kicks off @ 12 noon, and the game kicks off at 6PM Saturday @ Legion Field.
See http://www.battleforthebones.com/ for more info.
Pick an excuse:
Football season.
Apathy.
My ear infection.
My ceiling falling in.
Oh, you don’t know about my ceiling falling in?
It all happened two saturdays ago (9/23/2006)…
Fairlyn got me up way earlier than I wanted to, so we went to the living room and I put on some baby einstien for her, and I found a nice spot on the couch for myself.
I was about 3 seconds into my early morning nap when I heard what sounded like a tree branch falling outside. I poked my head out the door, looked around, and saw nothing. However, when I turned around I saw this:
Directly above my daughter’s head.
I scooped her up, called DrWife into the room, and then started moving furniture out as fast as I could. I enlisted the help of my neighbor for the large stuff (thanks Jeremy!) and in under 30 mins, the room was empty.
While Jeremy and I were moving all of the furniture around, DrWife went to the Home Depot and returned with some painters tape and two rolls of plastic sheeting. I sealed off the room (to prevent the dust and insulation from spreading all over the house) and taped over the air registers so that I could minimize my cooling losses after the ceiling fell.
About 2 hours later (while I was finally getting that early morning nap) the first section of the ceiling fell (DrWife was at the grocery getting food for the Blazer-Tailgate later on that day, and Fairlyn was sleeping). I didn’t even get up to inspect the damage until DrWife returned (in my mind, there was no use… I was snoozing comfortably and there wasn’t much else I could do at that time).
I took a few pictures and moved a few pieces of sheetrock away from the front door so we could open it again, thought about how much this all sucked, and then started getting ready for some UAB football…
Right as we were walking out the door, we heard another section of the ceiling fall, again ignoring it until we got home.
Here’s a few more pictures of the final damage:
Sunday, my dad and I spent a few hours cleaning up the mess and putting up plastic sheeting over the gaping hole in my ceiling, and Monday I started the claim process with my insurance company.
They called me back that afternoon and said:
DENIED
Why you may ask? Because there was no “cause”. The Ceiling just fell for no reason, and not because of water damage or something else forcing it to fall down!
The nails were still in the rafters, there was no sign of water damage or anything else other than insulation in my attic.
What did I learn from this experience?
Lie to your insurance company. Tell them that you are an irresponsible homeowner and that you store crap ON the sheetrock in your attic. Throw a bucket of water in your attic if your ceiling falls for no reason, that’ll get ‘em to cover it!
I finally found a contractor that I can trust (I used to work with his wife and DrWife’s brother played baseball with his stepson) and he came over this afternoon to poke around my house, and hopefully he’ll be back with me tomorrow and I’ll know what the damage is going to be…
