There's a new poll up on sidebar. I'm trying to gauge how bored everyone is of this offseason. The depth of my boredom rests comfortably between "gouge my eyes out with a spoon" and "take an acid-filled water balloon to the face". I spent about two hours tonight shoveling snow (read: ice) thanks to the delightful hail storm Jebus decided to dump on us this weekend. Regardless of how often I tell myself that we should do the shoveling when the snow is still soft, I never seem to follow through on that and wind up out there with the ice-breaker, wrenching my back and shoulders to a nice burning soreness.

Kim (the wife) and I moved into a new house in Wyckoff, New Jersey, back in June, so this is our first winter at the new digs. We previously lived in Rochelle Park and we both grew up in Glen Rock, so we have plenty of familiarity with the area. Anyway, our house is a nice corner lot, which fortunately only has sidewalk on one side, saving us from the typical corner lot drawback of having twice as much sidewalk to shovel. To make up for that stroke of luck, the town plows are kind enough to deposit much of the street's snow right onto our walk, providing us twice the snow-shoveling fun than we might otherwise have had.

Kim and I have been together for more than nine years and were married (in Maui!) last August (2006). We have two boys: Oscar and Riley. Oscar is six now; Riley one. Riley sleeps with us religiously; Oscar, only occasionally, though the likelihood of him sleeping with us improves dramatically when there's thunder. I never had a dog growing up, as my father has serious canine allergies that he generously passed along to me. However, we found out that Cairn Terriers are hyper- hypo-allergenic, and after we got Oscar I finally realized what I was missing all of those years. If you're a dog person, you know what I'm talking about.

I started blogging in September of 2003. Inspired much by Aaron Gleeman and David Pinto, I took a crack at the online writing thing and have been doing it ever since. With my love of the Mets and a newly-discovered interest in something called sabermetrics, I combined those two interests into a blog I called SaberMets. A little more than a year after that I teamed up with a bunch of other Mets bloggers -- seven others, to be exact -- and started MetsGeek. Coincidentally, right around the time MetsGeek was getting started I was contacted by Blez to see if I wanted to pen the Mets blog for a fledgling sports blog network called SportsBlogs Nation. The site was to be called Amazin' Avenue, and I've been writing here for almost three years since.

That's how I ended up here.