Battle of Battle Creek

The “battle” was last weekend and I’ve waited a week for Ron or Steve F. to post this, but I guess they’re sore losers! Yes, Steve B. is the new “Fall Family Champ”! Can you believe that? Steve F. and Ron must have really had an off weekend!

Gary’s 50th Birthday Bash

Better late than never. October is such a busy, fun-filled month for us; Steve’s father’s birthday, Steve’s birthday and Blake’s birthday so we’re having a party and even a play ground for the kids from www.softplaydesignandinstallation.co.uk. But best of all this year, was getting together with family to celebrate Gary’s 50th. My pictures are a little out of focus (hopefully Kenny & Gary have better), but I thought my few pictures might get the ball rolling with others posting theirs.

The first two pictures are from our evening at Havana’s. The third is a shot of the Neshaminy Creek in Chalfont from the bridge (remember when it was an old wooden bridge?). The last is one of the covered bridges we visited.

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Geni.com

Geni.com is a combination social network/genealogy site. They are trying to use the social network concept to create family trees with the eventual goal (quite ambitious I might add) of creating one giant family tree that includes everyone in the world – hence their motto “Everyone’s Connected”.

The site is extremely easy to use and is growing by leaps and bounds. They only went live six months ago – within one month they had signed up 100,000 users and they just recently added their 5,000,000th profile. I’ve registered on the site and started building the Fall Family Tree. I’ve also created a link to Geni.com under Web Identities on the blog sidebar. However, you won’t be able to get to the tree until someone who is a part of it invites you to be a part of it. Once you accept an invite to join, the link in the sidebar will take you to your view of the tree.

I though I’d run a little test case and see what you guys think of the idea of continuing to build the tree (I know Marilyn had a little bit of a genealogy urge a while ago but don’t know if that’s still there).

I added us, Mom and Dad, and our grandparents, along with Harry, Grace and Jack. That gave me a pretty good perspective of how the tree is built. I’m going to extend an invitation to Marilyn and Gary and encourage you two to add to the tree and invite others in your family to join (you can invite someone to join by merely putting them in the tree along with their email address – you can also add people without their email addresses if you just want to expand the tree).

Marilyn – I suggest you add Shannon and as much of the Bergquist clan that you can get to buy into it (also this might be a good opportunity to include Linda, Richie, and Carol). Gary – add the kids and see how many Cortners you might get to go along.

If that little test seems to go well, then we can open it up to Ken, Steve, and Ron and their in-laws and we’ll run with it.

One thing to keep in mind is be be sensitive to how much personal information you include when filling out an individual’s entry. At least for the living, I’m just going to put in their name (and email address when I invited them), then let them make the decision about how much info to include.

The two of you should be getting an email invite shortly (Marilyn – I’m sure this means tomorrow morning for you but Gary may still be awake). Let me know your thoughts as you play with it.

For any others who might be making their once a month visit here and are curious about what the site is like, here’s a Wall Street Journal article on Geni.com.

Sometimes the internet is freaky…

I spend a fair amount of time on a sports forum called PennStateHoops.com dedicated naturally to Penn State basketball. There was a thread today that was off on a tangent where someone mentioned a couple of famous Fordham basketball players/coaches. In that thread it came to light that the poster didn’t know John Bach who coached at Fordham before he came to Penn State as their coach. I decided to educate the guy a little on Bach (see my post).

Since Natalie Berrena is John Bach’s granddaughter I couldn’t help but include a quick paragraph, and a little commercial, about her. I wanted to put a photo in the post so I naturally Google “Natalie Berrena” for images. Low and behold what popped up on the Google results page but this photo:

Needless to say I did a double take.

Google found one of my posts in our blog and I guess Natalie’s name was fairly close to our image so it tagged the image with her name.

Try it yourself – Google image search for “Natalie Berrena”.

Wonderful World of Winter


A beautiful day at Steve and Mary Fall’s on Friday the first. We had 12″ of snow which started last night and as of about 10:00 am the first day of Dec it is still snowing. I don’t have a name for my snowblower (as Gary has), but it still does the trick. Seems the last two times I have gone to a concert we have been hit by a snowfall. Last year was on the way to a Hot Tuna show. This year we were coming home from Bob Seger. Not really a fan of his, but had some friends who wanted to go and we tagged along. I will say though I was quite impressed. If you like him I suggest going to his show. It was good.

Anyway, here is my first attempt at attaching a picture. Actually, I guess if you wanted to get picky you could say my second as I tried earlier this year to attach a picture of my trip to Mesquite, but since the picture was deleted from the computer I couldn’t do it. At least this time I know the picture is here as I just downloaded it from the camera.

Fall Family Champion

There is a new champion. Ron, Steve B, Nick (Ex champion), and I played Tuesday. We had three pretty nice days of weather here. Anyway, we played a points game. Six points for low man, 4 for 2nd, 2 for 3rd and zero for 4th per hole net.

Nick started slowly taking only 2 points in the first 4 holes, but made a charge on the last 4 holes of the front nine. I believe he picked up around 17 point for those holes. He was still trailing Ron and I, but was defending valiantly. Unfortunatly, he started the back nine about the same way. With five holes to play Steve B. and Nick were pretty much out of it. I was trailing by about 5 points and could have jumped to the top of the leaderboard if I was just able to knock down a couple of putts on the next 2 holes. Too bad for me, I wasn’t up to the task. On 16 I pretty much handed the championship to Ron by knocking 2 tee shots OB, but Ron let me back in the game by moving a 20 ft chip about 1 foot. He took 3rd on the hole for 2 points. I got zero.

Two holes to play and I was down 5 points. (By the way this is all by memeory so I may be a little off.) Ron bogeys the hole to lock up 2 points. I have a 6 foot parr putt to tie Nick to give me a much needed 5 points. MISS AGAIN, DAMN. I tie Ron and we both get 3 points. I need a miracle on 18. It doesn’t happen. Ron wins and is now the proud owner of 2 shirts and a hat. We still need the 2nd shirt embroidered Ron. Congratulations to Ron.

Get ready for your chance next year boys and girls. You know you can pretty much depend on an opportunity to win this coveted title at The Battle of Battle Creek. For those not aware I beleive The Battle will become a mandatory 4 day event next year.

Ronnie’s Riotous Raucous!

After a fabulous feast at Lou Malnatti’s (sorry Shannon) we continued to party at my house amidst the destruction/construction of our kitchen. Most of the evening was spent trying to take a picture of the six of us (guess I better learn how to use the delay). Who could ask for a better 48th birthday, right Ron?

NEW Fall Family Champion

Sorry this has taken a while to get to all of you. As you are all aware Ron is not the Fall Family Champ and neither am I.

Nick and I played about 4 weeks ago. Since Nick had not played all year, and if you’ve ever seen his game, I figured match play a stroke a hole would be pretty easy for me to retain my title. Well, unfortunatly, I was wrong. I beleive the final was something like 6 and 5. He shot 103. I shot 94. His 103 wasn’t a real indication of how well he shot during the match play. Once he had it won he wasn’t quite as focused as he was on the first 12 holes. He should have broken 100 easy.

Anyway, he has both the shirts and the hat. I have tried unsuccesfully to get another match this year, but Nick is going to school full time and putting in about 25-30 hours a week at IKEA. By the way, his emploeyee discount is 15% if anyone was to take advantage.

Since the weather is changing rapidly I beleive Nick will have this title into 2007. Get your plans together now to challenge him before Battle Creek or we may not have our tournament in a tournament event next year.