Soccer Saturday

I know everyone wants a recap of yesterday's US v. Mexico World Cup Qualifier, so here it is. Mexico came out playing for the tie, knowing that this would get them automatically into WC2006. They also came out playing dirty, really trying to hurt DeMarcus Beasley fresh from his return from injury. After a scoreless first half, the US came out with more intent to score than ElTri and notched their first in the 55th after Oguchi Onyewu re-directed Eddie Lewis's cross off the post and Steve Ralston tapped in the rebound. Just 6 minutes later Beasley found the back of the net after playing a short corner to Landon Donovan who dropped it back to Claudio Reyna who then one-touched it back to Beasley who ripped it past the keeper. At that point, Mexico lost all hope and collapsed. My man of the match vote goes to Onyewu who basically made Mexico's all-time leading scorer Jared Borgetti his bitch.

Now that I have that off my chest I want to say a few other things.

First, if you decide to donate to a charity I would go through this site that KROQ is talking about - www.networkforgood.com. It has many charities listed and gives you information about how they spend their money. Look at how much the Red Cross spends on its programs. Billions. I donated to America's Second Harvest which basically provides food and survival kits. I also gave a smaller donation to "Noah's Wish" which helps animals that are victims of natural disasters. Being a somewhat emotional geek I made the donation in the memory of my brother's old dog, Mark, who was the greatest dog ever. When all of Southern California was on fire a few years back I spent time at the local evacuation center building a cages to hold refugee animals. My friend Andrew and I devised a system using pieces of fence that were donated to create a giant compound of connected cages that ended up housing around 100 dogs. We called it the MyAss Animal Evacuation Center, there is a long story of where the MyAss name comes from, but we'll avoid that subject for now. In any case, it felt good to do it and made my sister-in-law's life easier since she was the person running the center.

Second. I start back to school on Tuesday. I'm conflicted with feelings of excitement to be back in the swing of things, but at the same time feelings of annoyance that I have to wake up early again and don't get to watch Jerry Springer anymore.

Third. If you haven't read any of the Harry Potter books you really should. I swore that I wouldn't do it, but I am now on book #3 (Prisoner of Azkaban) and they are cool. Plus, they are kids books so you can really put a whole book away in like a week or 2. However, I am not going to become a Harry Potter nerd.

Finally. I put this in a comment on her blog, but I want to also say that my wonderful fiance took the GRE yesterday and did good. They tell you your score when you are done since you take it on a computer. Amanda is really smart, but won't admit it, so I will tell you that she is really smart (and pretty cute).