Game day

Yesterday, I crossed off yet another item on my bucket list.  Nothing overly challenging, and something I can definitely see myself doing again in the future.  A friend of mine regularly buys football season tickets for the Seattle Seahawks.  I had made it known to him that I had never attended an NFL game and that I would love to do so.  Well, turned out he couldn't go to the August 20th Seattle-Minnesota matchup and asked me if I was interested in the tickets.  I checked my calendar and to my good fortune, I was free that day!  He sold me the tickets for half price.  Now, it wouldn't be fun going alone, so I found a female friend who had also never been to a pro football game, so it was perfect.

After a Korean food lunch in Lynnwood, we drove to the Uwajimaya food store near CenturyLink Field, site of the night's game.  Uwajimaya is a great place to pick up food and snacks if you're going to either CenturyLink Field or Safeco Field for Seattle Mariners baseball games.  We were lucky to find a free parking space along the street just a few blocks away and soon joined the other eager football fans streaming into the stadium.  Our seats were up in the 300 level and we had a great view of the field.  It was a bit far away to get really good photos, but I still managed to get a few decent shots of the action.

There were Minnesota Vikings fans scattered throughout the stadium, including in my section.  During the game, I overheard some good natured banter between Seahawks and Vikings fans, but everyone was having a good time.  That's one thing I've observed while attending Mariners games in the past and this game, too...Seattle fans are polite and display good sportsmanship.  With the violence that occurs all too often at sporting events in other cities, it's nice to see that rarely happens in Seattle.  Well, the Hawks ended up losing the game, 7-20, but I still enjoyed myself.  I would love to go to more games in the future.  I think that will happen.

Turning a new page

As some of you know by now, my Five For Fighting Fan Central website is now frozen in time.  For those who don't, here's the story.  Last year, my web host quit supporting my site builder.  That caused some momentary panic, considering it IS my website that was affected...my FIVE FOR FIGHTING fan site!  After a quick call to Tech Support, I got access back to the site builder, but I was on my own using it.  Not a big problem, considering I never had much trouble with it.  At that time, I knew my website's days were numbered, and I would eventually have to rebuild the site.

Well, that time finally arrived about a week ago when the other shoe fell, so to speak.  My web host informed me that my site builder was being removed from their systems.  Now, that won't affect the existence of my fan site...that will still be available for everyone to visit and enjoy.  But, for me, I will no longer be able to edit or modify the site.  Needless to say, when I got the notification email, my stomach turned flip flops.  I knew the day was coming, but I was totally unprepared to create a whole new website!  I immediately started looking over the list of site builders my web host had available and found one to my liking.  It had some nice features that my current one doesn't have, looked simple enough to use, and it was FREE!  There was some uncertainty on how to install the new software and use it without interfering with my current website.  So, I called Tech Support again...love the 24/7 service...and the nice guy I spoke to talked me through the process. 

With that done, I felt a sense of relief...and anticipation.  The old site builder I had been using was super easy...but, it was also at times, very time consuming.  I had to create much of the site BY HAND since there were only minimal templates.  That meant a lot of inconsistencies...nothing was perfect from page to page since I moved things around myself!  Yeah, it still looked good, but it always bugged me...I'm kind of an obsessive perfectionist.  Well, with this new software, there are site designs to choose from, and ways to edit everything.  AND, every page has templates!  Still, since it was new software, I had some learning to do.

Actually, this was the best time for all of this to happen.  There is not a whole lot going on in Five For Fighting land.  John Ondrasik has been doing some shows in the past month and has a few more to go.  But, he'll be spending most of the rest of this year and into early next year writing new songs and preparing to record his new album.  That gives me several months to work on my new fan site.  Today, I spent about six hours familiarizing myself with the new site builder. The software company has many helpful video tutorials to help make the journey a less bumpy one.  I even managed to start working on my fan site home page a little bit.  When I called it quits for the day, I felt encouraged and optimistic.  It will take awhile to create my new site to my picky satisfaction, and there will be a lot of tweaking along the way.  But, I hoping everyone will enjoy the results of my labor when it's all done.  Stay tuned Five For Fighting friends...