MNF, not really.

For me, Monday nights used to be reserved for Monday Night Football on ABC. For over 30 years I could watch an exciting game and catch the highlights of the other Sunday games during the halftime highlights show.

From Howard Cosell, Dandy Don Meredith and Keith Jackson (replaced the next year by Frank Gifford) to Al Michaels and John Madden, it was always something to look forward to.

1 Overview 2 History 2.1 Pre-1970 2.2 1970s 2.2.1 Jackson, Cosell and Meredith 2.2.2 Cosell, Gifford and Meredith 2.2.3 Cosell, Gifford, Williamson and Karras 2.2.4 Cosell, Gifford, Meredith and Tarkenton 2.3 1980s 2.3.1 Cosell, Gifford, Meredith and Simpson 2.3.2 Gifford, Meredith and Simpson 2.3.3 Gifford, Simpson and Namath 2.3.4 Gifford, Michaels and Swann 2.3.5 Gifford, Michaels and Dierdorf 2.4 1990s 2.4.1 Michaels, Dierdorf and Esiason 2.4.2 Michaels and Esiason 2.5 2000s 2.5.1 Michaels, Fouts and Miller 2.5.2 Michaels and Madden 2.5.2.1 The end of the ABC era 2.5.3 Move to ESPN

Since 2005, Monday Night Football on ABC is on NBC on Sunday night as the week's showcase game of the week. Now, Monday Night Football is found on ESPN. Having big games on both Sunday and Monday nights, I tend to have less interest in them unless it's a really good matchup. Sunday nights I catch most of Fox and either Desperate Housewives or a good PBS mystery show if one is on. Football gets the commercials.

On Monday night, unless it's a really good matchup or if I'm doing well in my football pools, I skip most of the game and again watch regular network fare, catching parts of the game during commercials.

I was 5 of 13 in my pools going into Monday night's game (very bad). And, San Francisco vs Seattle is hardly a marque event to watch. On top of that, the game was lopsided (which is only fun to watch if it's your team leading).

So while Amy snoozed on the couch, I took some pictures of her pets as they were on a typical weeknight.

Fall and deadfall.

Watch out for the truck Gage. Oh well, fate is fate. If he was George of the Jungle it would have been a tree.


Poor Gage. Poor Winston Churchill.


Not related but by the way, Aimers came home with a little black kitten last week. Said she was watching it for a friend (Amanda) who was going to be out of town for a week.

That fabrication fell apart when my brother in law saw Amanda at work a day later. We have a new kitten.

I have to admit he is cute though dangerous. He has almost tripped me twice running between my feet while I'm walking in the house. I wish I had that energy.

Keeping with Amy's local sports team nomenclature (Cubs and Chicago Bears), he is named Teddy Bear to go along with her dog, Cubbie Bear. And ironically, the Bears are in a stretch where they are playing like Teddy Bears.

It had pretty much quit drizzling Sunday afternoon so Cubbie and I went out to the backyard to take some pictures.

Our backyard borders a field that will eventually be developed. (One good thing about the slow housing market.) The land is sold, but until houses are built, farmers lease the empty land. They rotate corn and soybeans each year. This year it was soybeans.

I took a bunch of pictures of this plant. I grew up on a farm and should probably know what it is but I don't. Help. I'm betting it is something really common and I'll feel stupid. Until I started taking pictures of them, I didn't even notice the pretty little things. They remind me of crowns or wrapped candy.

At the end of the garden I have a large burn pile. We throw all yard waste on it and usually burn it in the spring and in the fall. This summer, morning glories grew wild on it almost covering it. I am holding off burning till it freezes and kills the flowers.

With the pieces of wood and branches, along with the growth, the burn pile reminds me of the deadfall from the movie Pet Sematary. Mine is only as wide as a burn pile would be, but I could imagine it being over twenty some feet wide as in the book.

To me, that was one of the scariest parts of the book. Below, I've included text that mentioned and described the deadfall as found in google.

Excerpts and notes:

Louis experiences what he believes is a very vivid dream in which he meets Pascow, who leads him to the "sematary" and refers specifically to the "deadfall," a dangerous pile of tree limbs that form a barrier at the back of the cemetery and warns Louis to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to."

Louis wakes up in bed the next morning convinced it was only a dream, until he discovers his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles. Louis still dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, coupled with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death

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Its a this point that Louis notices the deadfall on the far end of the Pet Sematary which separated these woods from the Indian woods. It occurred to Louis that this deadfall seemed too "convenient, too artful, to perfect, for the work of nature."

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deadfall - a tangle of weather whitened old branches at the back of the clearing. It's maybe twenty-five feet from side to side and about nine feet high. At either end are thick knots of underbrush that look impassable.