For anyone that actually reads this, I apologize for not having made any entries in a while.

I've been otherwise occupied as my wife Michelle and I have been house hunting for our first home. As neither of us has much idea about the process, we've been getting a crash course from friends and parents and realtors and loan officers. It is occasionally a headache.

But we aren't making irrational decisions. We've figured out how much we can spend without stretching the household budget too thin to account for unplanned/emergency expenses. We're learning how to use the local Property Valuation Assessor's website to decide how overpriced some of these houses are for their neighborhoods, and we're praying that God lead us to the house He has intended for us.

But the mortgage process is purely a work of Satan. You'd think that the interest rate you get charged would be sufficient for the bank to get its money, but no, they've got plans to bleed you for thousands of dollars more in other fees. For the sake of comparison, I wonder how it would work if you got your loan on the black market, or just somebody with cash on hand that was satisfied collecting the interest associated with such a loan, with the deed as collateral.

Anyway, we're taking the next week off from work to really hunt for a house. Hopefully, I'll have good news by then. 

One of the signs of getting old is that you're never awake anymore to see the late night talk shows after Letterman and Leno.

Last night, I was awake with my wife until after Late Night With Conan O'Brien came on. I haven't seen Conan in years, and I was very surprised that when he came out for the monologue, Conan doesn't have red hair anymore. It's a light brown now. Did he color it? Or is this a natural fade of his hair color?

There's been a lot of flap in the media lately about Barry Bonds and his climb towards Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list. Most of the media think that Bonds' pursuit of '714' is a special event, because Ruth's number is such a lexicon of baseball statistics.

I say that's biased, and biased because of the age of any media type who says it. I am only 33, which means that Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth's total before I even knew what baseball was. Ever since I began following baseball at the end of the 1970s, the only home run total that mattered was Aaron's 755. I've never known Ruth's 714 as being anything more than a number Hank Aaron passed along the way to posting his own.

In fact, the only reason I know the significance of 714 is because the video highlights of Aaron's 715 are burned into my mind, along with the harrowing journey he had to take in order to get there.

714 is an old, white man's number. 755 is a real number, and if Bonds approaches that, then we have reason to take notice.