Why I Oughta...

With The Masters coming so quickly after the Final Four, my sports-related Official Google Blog posts are coming fast these days.   Just 7 days after I told you guys about the latest Final Four trends , I found a ex-pro golfer at Google to "sign" my latest piece.    This one was fun, but because the trends around the game have been so dominated by Tiger's off-course issues, there were a few problems with hanging our hat on the leading players. As I write this, I'm watching the final holes at Augusta and just as our post posited, there are very talented, but relatively unknown golfers coming on strong to contend for the green jacket. (Hello Jason Day, Adam Scott, and Charl Schwartzel!) One trend that I didn't get into the post was around the Par 3 contest that takes place the Wednesday before the tournament opens.  This year it seems, interest in the Par 3 contest skyrocketed as more golf fans wanted to know more about it.  Perhaps it has something to do with E

After seeing this charming can in the hardware store for many years, this week was the first time that I actually went and bought Durham's Water Putty.  Look at that strongman on the can:  he's pretty trustworthy, isn't he?  I sure hope so because I've begun to work with this stuff on my second Easter craft project.  This one is a bit more secretive and I won't be sharing what exactly I'm doing because I'm (hopefully) going to be gifting this craft project for an Easter present.   I can, however, say that after working with this water putty for a bit today, it sure has a lot of uses I can foresee and does become "rock hard" as the can implies.    I'll show you the results closer to Easter and perhaps even share the how-to in the project. 

One of two craft projects I'm trying to take on for Easter is this Egg Garland from Martha Stewart .  Her directions call for the blowing-out of actual eggs, but I figured there had to be a better/different way.  I wasn't interested in blowing out 60 eggs, nor did I think I could actually do so without breaking a lot of eggs into little collections of shells. So off I went to Michael's Crafts to find a replacement.  In my head, I was going to buy wooden eggs, but I spotted these paper-mâché eggs and figured they'd fit the bill.  As you can see, I've started to drill the holes in both ends and soon will drop a few coats of paint on them.    They're light - like real eggs - but fairly unbreakable.  Sure, they can get dented, but I'm not going to go cray thinking that if they fall off of their perch the eggs will all crack.  And, since they're pretty much a dead ringer size-wise, I think we'll fool most folks who see them. The goal?  Have the garlan

Nat gave me a brand new squirrel-proof bird feeder for our backyard for my birthday (more on that later, I suppose), which required a trip to my favorite store (Menards) to stock up on some new seed.  That's where I came across this pretty cleverly branded bag of seed:  Beetle Mania bird seed .  It is aimed at Cardinals, Wrens and Warbles - which are bigger than the birds we're after, so we passed on it, but it sure did make me think long and hard about dropping it in our cart. 

First....Dannee Polomsky won!  Yahoo!  Congrats to Dannee and her family! Now...on to the voter post:  The Babe is getting very experienced at voting!  This was her third time at our polling place in Elmhurst.  Here she was at just a little older than one month old in February of 2010 and here she is in November of last year at 11 months old.  She's not likely going to remember any of these voting experiences, but it certainly brings a new perspective to voting for me:  the candidates we're electing today are going to shape the Elmhurst of tomorrow that the Babe is going to grow up in.

After weeks and months of campaigning, it all comes down to the voters in Elmhurst.  I've been actively supporting my neighbor and friend Dannee Polomsky in her bid to represent our  neighborhood on the City Council.  She's done everything she could in the campaign and more importantly, she did everything the right way.  Win or loose, she's going to be able to hold her head high around town - and that's just as important as anything else in politics.  I've been on the ballot three times.  Once as a Park District Commissioner, and two times as a Village Trustee (and like four times as a Precinct Committeeman, too), so I know what is going through the candidates heads.  Too often we loose sight of that, but tomorrow morning, one of the candidates is going to wake up a winner and the other is going to roll over, see the alarm clock and have to deal with loosing.  If you do the right things during the campaign, that Wednesday after the election isn't so bad.  Our

Well, Well, Well.  What do we have here .  According to a tip from one of my pizza spies - Equation Boy/Man - Downtown Elmhurst will be graced with a second wood-fired pizza oven.  Joining Rosalia's Deli wood-fired oven on North York Street, it appears that a place named Pazzi di Pizza is opening on the other end of York at 105 S. York Street - right next to Cafe Amano's building.  It is taking the place of the shuttered Wine & Vine and appears (see the map below) that there will be outdoor seating. Link to the Pazzi di Pizza website that I screen-shot above:  Here . This wood-fired craze has been lighting up the pizza scene across the country with new ovens popping up left and right .  Interesting to see the trend hit home right here in Elmhurst.  The return to this bare-bones pizza shop - where the glowing oven is front and center - is good for the pizza business and good for consumers.  I don't know the breakdown of pizza consumed out of the house vs. inside t

We did it.  We pulled the trigger on the playground purchase.  After a few weeks of research, we came to the conclusion that we couldn't beat the deal on the Cedar Summit Panorama Playset from Costco .  We went down to the Rainbow showroom and while some of their sets are spectacular, the prices were a bit rich for us.  Menards has build-you-own kits, but I'm not sure we could design and build something as nice as this Costco set.  As you can see, it comes in six boxes - some of them HUGE.  It took some work, but with half of it on top of our car and the other half inside, I got it home.  It now resides in our garage awaiting a warm weekend.  I have some groundwork to do in leveling and clearing the site as well as thinking about timbers to retain/hold in the mulch.  Hopefully by Memorial Day, we'll have the Panorama up and useable.

We have a few new tools/toys to show off today.  The fine folks at Google have added some new capabilities to all Blogger blogs (that's the platform I use to power this site) including the addition of five new "Dynamic Views".   Those of you reading this should know (and likely do) that I work at Google and am writing this post on my own accord and these views posted here are mine alone and NOT that of my employer.    Now...back to the post: Blogger - as a platform - doesn't get the credit it deserves these days, but the product has come along really nicely and the flexibility it allows for these days is the best among it's peers.  Of note, for all you bloggers (Not capital "B") who are thinking about using the Blogger (capital "B) platform to power your blog, you should find a lot of comfort in the fact that the entire operation has been backed by Google's Data Liberation Front - and you can quickly/easily export your entire set of content

As I've mentioned before , I've taken on the task of penning a series of "sports trends" blog posts at work as one piece of a effort for the company to create a "voice" around major sports events and in the sports-specific media.  Yesterday, on the Official Google Blog, we ran my latest piece on the 2011 Final Four and search trends entitled:  Searching for a Cinderella Story .  As I've done in the past, we looked at search trends around the hot topics of March Madness and the Final Four.  With two good Cinderella stories in VCU and Butler, the search story lines are strong.  One neat point I think we drew out was how hoops crazy the State of Indiana is right now over Butler.  While in every other state Katy Perry trumps just about anything else search-wise, the Bulldogs of Butler have overtaken her this week. The other fun part of this post was including a link to the Werner Ladder Company in the final paragraph about cutting down the nets.  They