It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post, and for this I would like to offer up several reasons.

First, on the way back from a 59-0 trouncing at the hands of Monmouth (who, I might add, is #9 in the country right now), my computer broke, so I spent the night on the phone with Dell’s finest Indian call center employees (sample question of our conversation: “But sir, how do you know that’s what is wrong with your computer?” “Well, Emmanuel, by the powers of deduction…”). It took a week to get my computer up and running, and I didn’t feel like blogging in the computer lab. I didn’t want to feel judged.

Then, we had a 27-12 win over Knox on the road (although starting QB Mike Bogard became the second guy on the team after RB Carlos Sims to have a season-ending knee injury). The Monday after, my body became utterly destroyed by some devilish combination of the flu. All I will say is that in addition to a fever, I had a lot of stuff coming out both ends. I wasn’t able to keep food or water down for a couple days, and lost 15 pounds in the process. It’s safe to say I really didn’t feel like putting anything up on the site when I couldn’t even put anything in my stomach. I was still able to play Saturday, albeit while chugging Pedialyte on the sideline between offensive series. We ended up losing another heartbreaker to Lake Forest 35-28, our fourth loss of the season by a touchdown or less.

After a Sunday off (thanks to the wonders of fall break), I’m back on the blog and we’re back on the grind getting ready for a trip to Illinois College. Having fall break has allowed us to focus more on football, which is relieving due to the massive piles of schoolwork we’ve been contending with so far. I’ve spent the week practicing, going to meetings, and attempting to convince Coach Pedersen and Coach Cooprider to let me play defensive back (although I haven’t played the position since fourth grade, when I was about 200 pounds lighter). Since most of the campus is gone, we try to do a lot of stuff together as a team. Last night we had a poker tournament, and some of the guys took it upon themselves to sport ridiculous costumes. Among the most ridiculous were Ryan Fletcher, who was wearing a clown suit with a cowboy hat and aviators, and Mike McLeran, who had on some sort of bird mask.

Now that we’ve made it through Tuesday and Wednesday practices, we’ll start to taper off a little bit on the physicality during practice. Tomorrow is Accessory Thursday, so I’ll need to come up with another stomach tattoo. Some of the more notable recent tats have included rap folklore such as 50 Cent (”Get Rich or Die Tryin’”), The Notorious B.I.G. (”Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problemz”) and Eazy E (”Eazy Duz It”). I didn’t quite feel like doing the tattoo last week due to my recovering state, but my massive weight loss tempted me with the possibility of writing “Flu = Trimspa, baby!”.

Above: A recent Sharpie tattoo, although I opted to put this one on the back.

Most importantly, this week marks the second game of the year in which we’ll actually be staying overnight in another city, which means we get to eat at the Olive Garden on Friday night. Last time it was an enjoyable experience, as I was able to persuade T.J. Schaid to eat an entire breadstick in one bite because I would mention it on the blog (I’d say a good 15% of the traffic to this website is T.J. looking at the picture I put of him on the blog). A table comprised mostly of wide receivers thought it was the most hilarious thing ever to tear off the ends of breadsticks and cover them up in the basket to make it look like they were whole, and then to go around asking guys if they wanted a breadstick.

Above all, it will be great to have another chance to go out and get a big conference win. And it will be great to spend another week playing with these guys.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris@thed3experience.com All original material copyright © 2008-2009 Chris Jarmon

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Posted: 10|21|09 at 8:39 pm. Filed under: My Life as a D3 Player.
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