A Mike Life

Last week a dear friend of mine passed away. His name was Jim Skane, or Skkorpion as he was known on the forums over at ArizonaSportsFans.com. He was an elderly gentlemen, a veteran with some paralysis that kept him confined to a wheelchair.

He was also the biggest Arizona Cardinals fan I’ve ever known. I met Jim up in Flagstaff at Cardinals training camp probably as much as 10 years ago. I was writing for a sports website back then and was covering the team. Jim read my stuff and hung out on my forum, so we just ended up meeting one day while I was up there covering the team.

Way back in 2002, Jim asked me to help him create Arizona Sports Fans. I built it and ran it from a technical aspect (plus pretty much lived on that forum for the next 6 years), while he took care of the other stuff. He even paid me monthly to maintain it for him.

We turned the site into what is probably the #1 AZ sports fan forum on the internet. We met other people from the board, had poker night, all the Cards fans got together for tailgating at games, meeting at halftime, you name it.

The site got so huge, it was starting to cost a lot of money to host it. So last year, Jim and I decided to sell the site to a company that would keep me on to run it, while they made money from hosting it themselves.

Jim…always looking out for me and my family, only took about 10% of the sale of the site, giving me the rest. He wanted me to use it to help get my little family started. Because of that money, I was able to go from a $450 truck payment to a used car with no payment.

It meant so much to me and to my wife.

Once we sold the site, Jim and I didn’t talk much. He checked in on the forum we have, saw some pictures of Lyla, said she was cute as a button, but I hadn’t spoken to him in awhile.

And I never will again.

The guy had all kinds of health problems (even at one point a few years ago his in-home nurses were trying to poison him!), and while I knew he was sick, I didn’t think it would actually claim his life this time. He’d said a few times before that he might not make it through the next week, but always came out of it.

Not this time.

Jim ol’ buddy…you were a die-hard Cards fan and a good friend to me. We didn’t talk much or hang out much, but you impacted my life more than most people ever could. Thank you for that.

I’m attending his funeral tomorrow with what I’m sure will be a ton of people from our message board who are mourning his loss right now.

The note from his family about the service asked everyone to be casual and wear Cardinals stuff if they were so inclined.

I’ll be donning the NFC Championship gear.

This past week has been a fairly busy time for us, not to mention a period of change for our baby girl.

I was in Las Vegas for two days last week doing a “proof of concept” demo with our client up there and it went very well. The feedback was positive and we only have some minor changes to make to our application in order to move forward. I have a ton of work to do THIS week as well for the same client as I have a 90% deliverable due on July 6th. Yikes.

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Wow, I had no idea Tim Burton was doing a new Alice in Wonderland movie. I read the book as a kid and rank it up there with The Wizard of Oz in terms of fantasy stories for children.

The idea of Burton taking that story and turning it into his own imagined world is very intriguing. Listen to some of the cast members: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee (as the Jabberwock!) and others.

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Happy 7-month birthday to Lyla today!

(by the way, how cute is this picture of Lyla and her cousin Jackson? OMG)

When you have a baby, sometimes things take forever to change. But other times, it can take just a few days or a week and suddenly everything is different.

In the last seven days, Lyla has slept through the night about 4-5 times and has done it a few days in a row now. In fact, it’s already starting to become the norm.

She even had two nights where she slept for 12 hours!

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I can’t believe that after 34 years on the planet, Father’s Day now officially applies to me.

I was thinking about the topic the other day…being a father. And a few weeks ago, I wasn’t even sure if I “felt like a father.” Not sure what I mean by that, but I know I just felt like “me” still, the same ol’ dopey guy who liked movies, sports, legos, comic books, the weather, etc.

I had a kid, but nothing had changed inside me to flip on the “father” feeling. Sure, I loved this little girl, I loved taking care of her, taking care of both my girls really. But it was probably just instinct. You just take care of things, that’s what we men do.

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Yeah yeah, I know what you’re saying: how many blogs does one guy need?

Well, I only had one before last night, now I have two. I don’t obsess over posting blogs like I used to, so splitting the weather portion of my topics to a new blog wont increase much of my time.

I’ve wanted to do the weather blog for awhile now. In fact, I bought the domain name about a year ago, had it all setup for some total awesomeness, but then backed off because I was just too busy with school and Pop Critics.

I also wanted to turn it into a money-maker somehow, but that’s really not the point anymore. It’s just there for me to have fun doing, posting pictures, talking about weather, whatever.

So visit it if you want, add it to your reader, favorites, bookmarks, whatever.

It’s called Haboobing.com and if you’re wondering about the name, read the About page on the site.

…and it’s been the longest decade+1 of my life.

Okay, I’m kidding. You know that. Jina knows that. I know that. But that’s one of the main reasons we’ve made it to 11 years.

We love to laugh, but we really love to do it together. We’re a constant source of entertainment for each other. If we have some boring dinner event to attend (like for work, etc), we always have a good time because we can make each other laugh.

There is much debate on who is actually funnier, but that’s a blog for another day.

We’ve been married 11 years. It’s actually still amazing to me that we’re in double-digits. Not that there was doubt that we’d get here, but that it’s been that long already. Truly, these years have flown by. Sometimes it was harder, sometimes easier, but never boring or slow.

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Thanks to a heads-up from Jason Clark, I saw the new trailer for 2012 today. Besides the awesomeness of John Cusack being in the movie, this apocalyptic disaster film looks friggin’ cool.

Watch it after the jump.

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Seems like these weather photo posts have been fun for some of you to check out every day or two, so I’ll keep going with them. I totally love finding them and sharing them, so it’s no skin off my back!

Some crazy weather in the Plains States the last few days. Here are some weather shots, plus a special video from CNN from a stormchaser freaking out about this massive tornado AND another video from TornadoVideos.net, the site I frequent most these days.

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If you’ve never seen Band of Brothers, don’t have access to the DVDs or HBO, you can watch it for free this weekend on The History Channel.

Just look for them on your listings for the exact time. Alan Sepinwall says the first five are on Saturday starting at 1:37 until 8pm, and then the final five are on Sunday from 12:16 – 7pm.

Weird start times.

Anyways, load up that DVR with them if you don’t have time. Save them for when you do. Band of Brothers may be one the greatest achievements in television history.

I wrote a review about it last year when I was still writing for Pop Critics. You can read it if you want to get a better idea on what it’s all about.

It would be easy to miss this story over here in America where we don’t always hear everything that happens in the rest of the world, so I wanted to pass it on to you guys.

Yesterday in Beijing, a freak storm hit the city at 11:30 in the MORNING and completely blacked out the city.

The pictures are kind of crazy…even here in Phoenix when we get bad dust storms and monsoons, it rarely gets that dark.

But this storm turned day into night. Creepy. And all the automatic lights thought it was time to come on.

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