A week of disappointments.

The week looked so promising. A whole host of things to look forward to, and a whole host of things that didn't go as expected. It had to happen eventually. Life is full of ups and downs, and this just happened to be a little more down than usual.

Leading off is the Daytona 500. It looked like a great race at first, but once again rain decided to come marching by. The good part is, it waited til the race was halfway over to begin coming down. The bad part is Dale Jr and Brian Vickers, two lapped cars, got into a melee and wrecked a third of the field. So much for the "trouble only happens in the front at Talladega" rule. The best cars of the field, Kyle Busch, Jamie McMurray, Jimmie Johnson, and Denny Hamlin were essentially eliminated within seconds. They were all in the top 10 at the time of the incident.

Who was at fault? Surprisingly, most pepole seem to think Dale Jr is mostly at fault. I've watched the video several times and its definitely a tough call. I have to put most of the blame on Vickers not because he blocked, but because he didn't come back up the track after he blocked. He was still straddling the out-of-bounds line when Jr came up and tagged him. If you're going to block, you gotta get back in position.

Then the rains came, and Matt Kenseth, who led one (1) lap was declared the winner. Right place right time for Kenseth. At least Roush finally has a Daytona 500 victory now. Its hard for me to like that victory though.

Today is Friday, and qualifying was today. Vickers on pole and McMurray qualified 3rd, which is awesome. However, he was slow in practice, so I hope he and Wingo found something good for a race setup.

On Thursday, Tyson, Colman, Brig, and I tried to fix an Xbox 360 that Ty bought online. We did the same fix we did to Tyson's first Xbox. Unfortunately, it didn't work quite as good. In fact, it didn't work at all. Its okay, I spent invaluable time with the brothers I love, and we enjoyed our failure. Still, I was looking forward to having a 360 to play. /whimper

Also, Rick Santelli's comments on CNBC were priceless. Tell it how it is, Rick! This is a microcosm of what's going on out there. Glenn Beck also has a great way of putting complex things like federal money flow into perspective.

And finally, something that I hope will cheer up those who are as melancholy as myself. A random picture, taken June 7th, 2007 in Newport Beach, California.