Handy Accessory

Let me get that for you

Quick Saturday bye week post to show off my latest piece of Redskins gear, a coworker was kind enough to gift me this Redskins keychain bottle opener and as it happens I have an immediate and relevant use for it, lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery has invited me to join him tomorrow for the Colts at Eagles game in Philadelphia and I think we may want to open a beer or two in the process.

Now that I have a real communications device check me on twitter.com/curlyr throughout the day as I microchronicle the oh so pleasant experience of attending an Eagles game as a (plausibly) neutral fan, I will also photochronicle this game for your enjoyment.

Hope you are having a great and Redskins free bye weekend.



Photo by me.

They're Here

Gotta support the team

The set is complete, the kids' jerseys arrived today, Brian Orakpo for Josh and a refresh of Clinton Portis for Will to go along with my Donovan McNabb and the three year old's non numbered jersey, these jerseys replace the ones they got in 2005, they have long grown out of those. Unfortunately I read the sizing wrong and these are a little big for eight year olds but what the heck, they will grow into them. Football Jersey Rule One does not apply until you can buy your own.

The boys will be christening their new jerseys in thrilling fashion, lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader lurker Wilbert Montgomery has invited them to join us for our annual trek to Eagles Stadium, Sunday's game will be our 22nd of the past 23 Redskins-Eagles games, my twentieth straight rivalry game and my eleventh Redskins-Eagles game in Philadelphia.

Tonight I tried to tell them it is not going to be all fun and games wearing burgundy and gold to an Eagles game in Philadelphia, not least Donovan's return, not leaster a game for the Division lead, kids younger than Josh and Will have cursed me a blue streak in that city, usually in tandem with their fathers. They were not ready to hear it, tonight was a night to let them wallow in the joy of graduating to a ritual their father and godfather have executed since before they were born.

We will talk personal safety later.



Photo by me.

It's Here

Looks good in burgundy and gold

After some unnecessary delays in the ordering process, mainly having to do with outfitting new jerseys for my eight year old sons who have outgrown their Clinton Portis and LaVar Arrington jerseys from 2005, we finally decided their new jerseys will be Clinton Portis and Brian Orakpo, my number five Donovan McNabb jersey arrived today.

After never wearing a football jersey in my life before the 2005 Redskins-Buccaneers playoff game, I have worn number 89 Santana Moss every gameday the past four seasons. With Dono coming to Washington there was never a question about whether I would change.

I will be christening this jersey on a fitting gameday, this Sunday lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery and I travel to Philadelphia for our 22nd rivalry game in the past 23, this will be my twentieth straight(!) Eagles-Redskins game, our streak of games goes back to the 1999 season, Donovan McNabb's rookie year.



Photo by me.

It's Back

I never forgot you

Back in the summer of 1991 when I was supposed to have finished college, my father, the original Redskins fan named Ben Folsom, gave me a Redskins rocking chair, it was in sincerity the only thing to which I was truly attached in that period of life when everything you own will fit into a Ford Escort.

This piece of Redskins paraphernalia accompanied me through two residences in Charlottesville Virginia, waited patiently for me three years while I toured the nation as a rock band sound engineer, moved back into my parents' house with me for a while then came with me to Arlington Virginia for three moves before accompanying me to my current residence in Alexandria.

It is unequivocally the most comfortable piece of furniture I have ever sat on to watch football or play video games, the Redskins rocker got me through many 3:00 am games of Madden 92, 93, 94 and 95 and every Redskins game for more than a decade.

The Redskins rocker finally failed me in January 2006. A week after the surgical strike on Tampa, when a high school friend and I were part of the rowdy Redskins contingent that used a compromised password to buy club seats at Buccaneers Stadium reserved for existing Tampa Bay season ticket holders, we flew in, partied hard, saw the Redskins win a tough game 17-10 with no Santana Moss, no offense and Sean Taylor ejected for spitting on Michael Pittman and flew back all in twenty-two hours, the Redskins were playing the Seattle Seahawks in the Divisional playoff round.

Well we all know the Redskins lost that game and in addition to the 2005 season, a collateral casualty of that game was my beloved Redskins chair, the upper vertical support came away from the rear riser, the screw broke clean off in the seat.

Well life and other things conspired to separate me from my rocker and for the last four years it has sat in the shed or in the back of the pantry, closed in and obscured by the rag bag, paint supplies and the tie dye bucket.

I always knew it was an easy fix, let me tell you folks I am that lazy, I abandoned the one piece of Redskins gear to which I was most bonded as an adult Redskins fan, I do not know how it happened, in retrospect I suppose the number 89 Santana Moss jersey I bought specifically to wear to that Tampa Bay playoff game, I had never owned a team jersey of any type before that game in my life, became my new Redskins avatar and I let the chair go like a kid growing out of an old toy, once the favorite and now too familiar.

My wife, a football fan herself with a clear understanding of what that chair meant to me, gave me a year to fix it, then began pleading for me to let it go and move on, there would be other rockers, other opportunities to associate my direct physical comfort with the football team that has been the only one I cared about my entire life. I filibustered and it was stashed.

Two weeks ago, when our three kids, ages eight, eight and three, were away in Fredericksburg at Camp Wilbert Montgomery, an annual affair that will reverse in two weeks when lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery's two kids come to stay with us for a week, we did what every married couple with young kids does when their children are out of town... CLEAN LIKE BUNNIES (hey, what did you think I was going to say?)

We re-orged the pantry from bottom to top and I found the chair. Tonight, with the wife out having fun with her friends and after all the kids were out, I finally did what I should have done four years ago: I fixed the damn thing.

In the end, it took five minutes, I drilled a pilot hole above the existing slot, the one with half the screw still in it, then sank a wood screw in and voila, my Redskins rocker is back. I sit in it as I write this post. It is Curly R's new home and my old one.

It is funny how things work, I can get motivated to raise a family, get to work every day, have a social life and find the time to publish nearly 1300 pieces on my little blog, I could never take five minutes to fix my Redskins rocker. Now it is like I am home again.



Photos by me.

My Next Phone Should Be?

Two way fanboy might not be able to resist

Last year before the 2009 NFL season my five year old Hewlett-Packard desktop PC finally failed, leaving me with a model year 2000 Compaq Armada M700 notebook as my only PC, an awesome and bulletproof laptop for its time, by 2009 poor thing could not run Windows XP and more than one application at a time, in researching and writing the typical Curly R post I have three or five or ten Firefox windows open at a time and forget trying to run Photoshop and get anything done.

So I finally took the plunge and bought a Mac and I have never looked back, it is supremely superior to anything I have ever used, I love it.

My phone is about to hit two years old, a Blackberry Curve that I had to get for a job I no longer have, I have always hated this phone with two exceptions: true satellite GPS and multiple recipients on text messages. I will be getting a new phone before the 2010 NFL season.

Mrs. Curly R has an iPhone 3GS and loves it, I think it is pretty cool but I had been looking to branch out to something else, with the Google Nexus One now available for AT&T I thought I would try that. But the 530 dollar price tag gives me pause. AT&T has been slow to get off the Android stick, with their first corporate offering not an open unit, clearly AT&T's alliance with Apple is preventing them from offering truly unfettered devices.

I am going to have to give this all some more thought now that I have learned Redskins new actual general manager uses an iPhone. I know it should not be surprising, I still think it is cool, up until now the Redskins culture under Dan Snyder has screamed Blackberry, all business and no fun.



iPhone 3GS from here.