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All month I have been walking on the treadmill for 45 minutes a day trying to do some form of exercise. It gets pretty boring, but I listen to the iPod or watch DVDs to pass the time. I decided to move over to the elliptical machine today to change things up a bit. 45 minutes a day on the treadmill did nothing to prepare me for the elliptical because after 7 minutes on it I was face down on the carpet gasping for air like a fish out of water. My wife cruises right through it for more than 30 minutes with no problems. Embarrassing.

Just don’t vote for anyone that winks at the camera. I would have thought these people were too young to give out the cheesy winks that they do but I guess I was wrong. Boneheads.

My wife is walking a marathon in May to raise money for stroke research with the American Stroke Association. It’s a great cause and anyone can donate. The ASA even setup a nice web site where you can donate on the Internet.

You don’t have to know us to make a donation. It’s a great cause and they need all of our help.

Did you know…

…every 45 seconds someone suffers a stroke?
…every 3.1 minutes someone dies of a stroke?
…there are 4.4 million stroke survivors?
…28% of people who have strokes are under the age of 65?

Click HERE to go to Valerie’s ASA site and help raise funds for the American Stroke Association. It’s a new year and you know you can always use another tax deduction.

Thanks.

After knowing that I was going to buy the Callaway X-18 graphite irons, I went to 2nd Swing Golf and hit a bunch of different clubs to make sure I was making the right choice. What surprised me most was that I liked hitting the steel clubs better than the graphite clubs.

I narrowed it down to the Callaway X-18 steel and the Ping G5 steel. I never even thought of Ping when I was looking for clubs but after hitting a ton of balls with them I decided that they were the ones. But not before causing a lot of noise in the store.

Since I had it down to the 2 brands they taped up the faces of the irons with masking tape and I hit a bunch more. What’s nice about that is not only does it protect the face while they are still in the store, but you can easily see where on the club you are hitting the ball because of the imprint of the dimples left behind on the tape. I hit them both about the same but the Pings were a little more consistent.

So they put this white tape on the bottom of the club that had a gauge on it. Then they brought out this Plexiglas mat, set a ball on it and had me hit it. After you hit it you look at the white tape and it is black where you are hitting the ground. Lets you know how the lie is working for you. The Ping was right on the money. He said you really couldn’t get any better than that. So I tried the Callaway and it was a little on the inside and a hair towards the heel. Again, not too bad, so he put a new piece of white tape on the Ping and had me try it again.

I took a huge swing at it and must have dipped down a little because the club caught the back edge of the Plexiglas and it sounded like an explosion went off. The club head went flying in to the wall and I was left just holding the shaft of the club. Everyone in the store turned to see what all the noise was. It was really loud. That Plexiglas is tough! Everyone agreed that no club would have survived the blow to the Plexiglas. Embarrassing.

I almost left with the Callaways but the Ping just felt a little better since it has a wider bottom to help get the ball in the air quicker. I don’t think I would have gone wrong either way and can’t wait to get out and try the new clubs.

Oh, the best part is that I call them my free clubs because we went to the casino and I won enough to more than cover the cost of the clubs. Enough that I also brought home a new Odyssey 2 ball blade putter. The only thing I have left to do is to have the regular flex graphite shaft on the R580 driver switched to stiff.

Traveling down in Raleigh, NC so I figured I would turn to the one device that has proven accurate any time I have ever traveled – the Neverlost GPS system from Hertz. Unfortunately Hertz was out of cars today so I had to rent from National. I reserved their answer to the Neverlost system and was surprised when they handed me a small Nextel device in a bag. To use it you suction-cup it to the windshield, press the green button twice, and a human comes on the phone asking you where you want to go. Huh? OK, I’ll play along. You tell the human where you want to go and they look up the route or address and push the route down to your phone.

From there the phone sort of works like the Neverlost by trying to talk you through the route and put arrows on the screen showing you which way to turn. If I had never used the Neverlost system I might not realize how bad this copy is. The screen’s backlight turns off so you can’t just look up and see what your next turn will be. It is slow. Numerous times it was telling me to make a turn when I was right on it. Not enough advance notice. It’s a guy’s voice. I like the female voice on the Neverlost.

But, once you can put all of that aside you want a device that will get you where you are going. This isn’t it. It had me turning all over the place. It told me to go east on a route and put it on the screen. Did I mention the screen is really small? So I made the turn it told me to and went east. It then decided to tell me I had gone off the route and it started recalculating. Terrible.

For the first time I really understand what they mean when they say “there’s Hertz, and there’s not exactly.”

That’s all for now. I need to go get directions off the Internet for my trip tomorrow because there is no way I am trusting that piece of junk anymore.

That wasn’t the prettiest game I ever saw but I’m thrilled with the outcome. I had people ask me all week if I thought the Seahawks were any good. Hello? They made it to the Super Bowl, of course they’re good! I’m sure it was a heartbreaking game for them since a couple calls going the other way could have made the difference in the score.

Pittsburgh had a great year and they did something that nobody thought they could do. I’ll never have to hear “one for the thumb” again. What a ride. We’ll miss Jerome and I’m glad he got to go out as the champion he is.

Pittsburgh Steelers – Super Bowl champions once again.