Constructive Summer

The smell of fresh-cut grass, the mournful whine of police sirens racing after football players fleeing a bar brawl, and the fragrant aroma of mold being blasted out of a long-unused cooler combined with vomit from two-a-days. Football season is near, and there's nowhere to hide from it.

The House Rock Built has had a very constructive summer vacation from blogging. Needless to say, we were all in the need for a little bit of a breather after a soul-crushing year of pigskin in 2007, and The House was no exception. Between growing some mutton chops, recording some tunes, and blasting off to Hong Kong and Thailand for a few weeks to soul-search/feed tigers/father a child with a local/lose hundreds of dollars playing Sic-Bo, the batteries are just about fully recharged. We're locked and loaded for 2008, come hell or high water.

In addition to being back in business, The House Rock Built made some off-season deals that will, with any luck, increase the quality and quantity of content for you to gobble up. In a landmark deal, The House has acquired the services of The Kid from Fire Mark May, a hard-throwing righty whose rise from blogosphere neophyte to award-winning cult icon in a mere year of blogging captured the imagination of a nation. Needless to say, it wasn't cheap, as I had to ship Trev Alberts a carton of Newports, a conditional sixth round draft pick, and release the bodies of three of his recently-killed soldiers. As you'd expect, the exchange took place, like nearly all nefarious dealings do, on a runway of an abandoned airport in The Gambia.

The first known picture of The Kid.

The Kid will be blogging here under the moniker "irishoutsider", so you can probably expect the amount of zany, off-the-wall goofiness to roughly double, depending on work levels and alcohol intake. Cultivating hobbies and relationships are fine and dandy eight months out of the year, but once training camp comes, it's time to kick both to the curb, strap on your beer funnel helmet, and dive feet-first into the churning chumbucket that is the 2008 college football season. Gentlemen, start your engines.

-fightinamish