When I started this blog it was part of my job. My boss then – Tony Dodero – wanted all of us on staff to segue into the new media and I was glad to do it since I already had a high ‘net consciousness when I helped him launch the company’s new websites for the local newspapers.

A lot has happened since then. And, I have to admit, I didn’t contribute as much to the blog at first because I was so busy with other responsibilities.

But then this political junkie’s dream happened – the 2008 presidential election. It was easily the most fascinating election I’ve tracked in my life and I doubt it will ever be topped. When the inauguration neared I felt compelled to cap it off by covering what I knew would be the story of my life. I decided to pay for my own plane fare and, thanks to some friends of mine, I had a hotel I could crash at in Washington, D.C. It was the perfect opportunity to breathe some life into my then-stagnant blog.

While there in DC, I, of course, encountered so much to write about from the concerts to the halls of Congress where I got to interview some local political leaders.

And it was there that I finally immersed myself in social networking, thanks to some cajoling from my friends Dave and Mary. Dave’s an IT director for a New York non-profit and Mary’s a website consultant. Mary could hardly believe it when I told her I hadn’t joined Facebook. I don’t blame her. I had a lame excuse. I blamed it all on my dissatisfaction with Friendster and MySpace, two social-networking sites that I considered dull and lackluster.

“But Paul, if you want to improve the traffic on your blog you’re never going to do it without Facebook, LinkedIn…” and she ticked off a number of other sites.

After some more cajoling I finally agreed to an experiment. I would join a few social-networking sites like Facebook and then post links to my blog posts from the inauguration.

My traffic tripled.

Granted, my traffic was pretty meager already, but you can’t argue with the stats.

I was hooked.

And thank God for that. Because it’s really how I got to know Mona.

Which brings me to the second part of this story – how my blog has evolved.

Mona and I were introduced when she pitched me on a story. Mona, the publicist, kept pitching me great stories, which I bit on, but one day she called and said she couldn’t find me on Facebook. It’s important to note that at this time we still hadn’t met in person and I actually didn’t even know what she looked like. She was still just the voice on the other end of my office phone line.

“Maybe it’s better if I ask you to be a friend on Facebook since my name is so common it’s hard to find me,” I said.

So I did that and she accepted me.

Our relationship grew from professional to personal. I’ll never forget how we got into a chat about “My So-Called Life,” a show we both loved, and I told her how I bought the original DVD set released in 2002, but never got the damned lunch box I paid for. Mona googled it and instantaneously found one for sale on eBay and posted it on my wall. I thought, this girl is hilarious.

When I left my job in Costa Mesa to work for a wire service my blog mission changed. My old employers graciously allowed me to keep the name, Supplied To Anderson, and keep the content, though I took it private. But I had to be careful what I wrote about. I couldn’t write about work anymore because the content I provide our clients belongs to them.

So I had an idea. Maybe the blog should just be more personal – about my life. And that’s what it has become.

And you can imagine how proud I felt when Supplied to Anderson recently won a second place from the Orange County Press Club for best vlogs. Proud, not for me, but for Mona. For us. And, really, if you want to know the truth, a little guilty because my name is on the award for our Vlog Day Afternoon posts here and she’s the one who deserves most, if not all, of the credit. Mona’s the one who learned iMovie on her own and helped us go from just single-camera talking-head vlogs to our zany Vlog Day Afternoon productions. Trust me, they’re quite elaborate and it takes Mona a long time to get them edited just right. I remember reading once how during the editing process Scorsese would spend a good deal of the time watching classic films, occasionally nodding and making a suggestion or two while his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmacher did the heavy lifting. I probably do even less than that.

So we put together a compilation of a typically crazy weekend we shot a little while back. Hope you enjoy it – it’s a taste of all the fun we have together.

And, of course, we put it together here and there and finished it up on a weekend we pledged to do basically nothing.

We’ll try to do more in the future. But, then, we’re having so much fun together we may not be that consistent. Hope you don’t mind.

P.S. When Mona read this she protested, “That’s not true, I don’t do it all. It’s a joint effort. We’re in it together.” As usual, she’s right. ‘Nuff said.

Several days ago Mona said something about us getting together after work for a nice dinner Thursday.

What for, I wondered?

She seemed a little surprised.

It’s the anniversary of your father’s passing, she replied.

Oh yeah. I actually had forgotten.

The first year without my father was the hardest. I suffered through severe grief that plagued me so much a doctor suggested anti-depressants for a little while. I rejected that notion, instead choosing his suggestion to mark the first anniversary by doing something we both enjoyed together. So I went to a superb jazz show in Chicago with my best friends. And it worked. I turned the corner on my grief. So much so that by this sixth anniversary it just crept up on me and I didn’t anticipate it.

Still, Thursday was a really difficult day for both of us. Mona lost her father in 2005 and it was our shared grief that bound us together initially.

Wednesday, though, brought such a high for us. I got off work in time to get home for the sunset. We used to love regularly catching those, but our lives had gotten so much busier of late.

As soon as I got home, I hustled Mona away from her laptop and we dashed on down to one of the beaches near our house. We could hardly see the sun through the gray on this overcast day, but we stayed anyway. And sometime during our shared euphoria of the special moment I formally asked her to marry me. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Almost since we started dating we’ve talked about marriage, and it has just increased in frequency.

Also, the Saturday before I had called my mother and her brother for their blessings. So those were the biggest steps. Still, it wasn’t really official. Even though Mona’s brother would call her mother to tell her, we still needed to meet with Mona’s mom to tell her in person. That would be the next important step.

But in between I felt like I had to, you know, ask Mona! And, of course, she said yes.

So after we got through Thursday it’s been a rising tide of relief and elation as all of our loved ones send us their blessings.

To think that before I met Mona I had given up on love and was growing more content with my bachelorhood. But I will save my story about how we met for another post soon. It’s one of my favorite stories about karma.

So on this Father’s Day, which was so sad for me six years ago as I made plans for my father’s funeral, the hardest part of the day was this morning when it occurred to Mona and I how much we would have loved having our fathers involved in our wedding plans. We both choked up a little, and then got our day started with a beautiful church service and later some drawing.

As we did last year when we both drew portraits of Mona’s father, this time we did sketches of my father. Hope you enjoy! And if your father is still with you, give him a huge hug for us, OK?

(Paul Raymond Anderson by Paul)

(Paul Raymond Anderson by Mona)

Today was one of the craziest days I’ve ever had as a reporter.

I’m not kidding. The deluge of news pounded me like a Dustin Byfuglien check against the boards. It was almost as crazy as being the lead rewrite the night the Plainfield tornado killed 28 people in 1990. Almost.

And I had extra incentive to write as fast as Jonathan Toews skates — I had to get done in time to see my beloved Chicago Blackhawks go for the Stanley Cup championship tonight.

But the breaking news just would not stop. Story after story, development after development kept flooding in like, well, let’s just resist the BP pun here, OK?

Finally, I got a chance to peek at the score. It was 3-2, Hawks, in the third period. Mona called. We had planned to meet to watch the game at one of our favorite restaurants. But we knew we wouldn’t make it in time. Besides, I still had one more story to write. What a tragedy. All was lost. If they won I’d have to miss it.

Then she got a great idea, as Mona usually does.

“Do you want to watch it on the Star Cam on msnbc.com while we stay on the phone?” she said.

“Yeah, and I’ve got a better idea,” I replied, reaching for my XM radio player and plugging in the earphone. I could watch that msnbc camera as it trails one player across the ice, not quite catching all of the action, but some of it, while I talked to Mona in one ear and listened to the play-by-play via XM in the other ear.

Then disaster struck. The Flyers — in this improbable season of theirs — rallied like Rocky looking for that glass skate before the chimes of midnight. 3-3. Overtime. Damn! It’s a Chicago team. They’re bound to choke, I thought.

So while the teams prepared for OT, I finished my work and headed for the door. I would listen to the game on my radio on the drive home — then I’d pick up Mona so she could get her first pair of glasses since 1989. Boy, did she need them, too. All that work on the computer is taking its toll on her eyes.

As I walked to my car I was suddenly struck with the notion that I could run a few blocks up the street and catch the overtime at a nearby sports bar.

Nah, I thought. Nothing would be finer than listening to it on the radio, maybe catching the end of it with Mona.

Then, just as I approached the freeway on-ramp, it happened. Glory struck. Patrick Kane’s crazy shot found its way into the cage, though none of us were immediately sure it had struck gold. But everlasting glory, it was.

Hawks are the Stanley Cup Champions. I yanked the car to the curb and howled with delight. And I called Mona — shouting into her voicemail, “We won!!!”

I grew up rooting for the Blackhawks — literally. I was barely old enough to turn on the TV and would watch my hero Stan Mikita, near the end of his career then, and root for other heroes like Tony Esposito. They were good then, but not quite good enough.

And sure there was that wondrous 1992 season when they, of course, had to bow to Super Mario. But we were all still so focused on Michael and Co. — the other team on Chicago’s West Side.

Then came the bad years. Was it 2005 when I blogged that the Hawks were the worst team in professional sports? To me, they stunk more than the Detroit Lions even. Just horrible. And I put all the blame at Dollar Bill Wirtz’s feet. Or Bill Worst, as we liked to call him.

Who knew that his son, Rocky, who ran the beverage side of the family business would want to take over? And was that a good thing? Boy, was it ever! He assembled a leadership team that finally got the job done. No more hiring coaches named after dog food who couldn’t even speak English! What a debacle. No, we picked the right players in the draft — remember the ridicule that came when the Hawks used the team’s only number one pick in history to get Kane? Looks good now, doesn’t it?

Everything looks good now. Let’s keep the championships coming, Hawks. Keep this team together and we’ll have a stampede like Michael’s Bulls in the ’90s.

Go Hawks!

I feared Mona would collapse.

No, really. I’m not exaggerating.

We’d just driven for hours from Laguna Beach to Indio to help our friends at 118 Degrees as they served goodies to the VIP at Coachella. Our task — take photographs, hopefully of famous people sipping on coconut drinks.

And the driving was just fine. We knew that was part of the bargain. We brought along some CDs for the ride of some of the bands we wanted to see — Sunny Day Real Estate, Deerhunter, Spoon and Yo La Tengo.

We were instructed to go to the Best Western in Indio and then go to Coachella. When we arrived, we scooted up to a van and asked if they were the shuttle to the festival. We just reasoned we were told an easy way to get to the event. Last year, we had a hell of a time finding parking so we just thought we were advised to take a shuttle into the VIP area.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. We later found out it was Goldenvoice’s goofy idea this year to have people checking into the VIP area get their wristband passes off-site at the hotel and then shuttle to Coachella. Or whichever way they wanted to get there.

When we got to Coachella, though, we were marched all around the festival from gate to gate, being told by increasingly more clueless security guards where to get into the show. Finally, we found what seemed to be the front entrance where tickets are sold.

That’s when I heard Mona mumble, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” I looked back and saw sweat streaking down her brow, her face flush with the heat of exhaustion and dehydration. I pulled her close, told her to lean on me and draw strength from my hand. We could make it. We made a promise to do a job and when I get into that mode it’s like “Lawrence of Arabia,” and I just keep trudging through the sand.

Which is fine for me. But I had someone else to think about now. It was yet another one of those reminders that it’s not just me anymore. So, I thought, should we keep going? I concluded, let’s try to go just a little further and maybe we’ll finally figure out how to get into the damned festival.

Finally, someone at one of the ticket booths told us — after he had to ask someone else, of course — that we had to go back to the hotel.

OK, new problem. How do we get back to the hotel now? Fortunately, we struck up a nice conversation with our shuttle driver on the way over and he gave Mona his business card. So she called him and luckily he was nearby and could shuttle us back. He did so for no charge (though we tipped him), we got our wristbands and then he shuttled us back to Coachella.

We got our second wind, checked in with Jenny and Billy at their booth, took a picture of Michelle Rodriguez from “Lost,” (who happened to stop by!), and then caught some great music.

It was a stroll through the ’90s for me. And it hit me — was it really that long ago that I saw Pavement in their prime? Do they really sound as amazing now as they did then? Yes and yes. As I heard Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan wring feedback from his guitar I thought how incredible it was that so many decades later the Velvet Underground’s “White Light, White Heat,” still resonates.

And Spoon. I could go into one of those pretentious music-critic adjective-riddled-tortured-metaphor testimonials, but here’s the highest compliment I can pay them: They sound so original. In an era when so many bands sound great, but seem so blandly the same, Spoon sounds like, well, Spoon. You know a Spoon song as soon as you hear it. That’s also true of Yo La Tengo or Pavement.

Sadly, though, we left shortly after seeing Radiohead’s Thom Yorke embarrass himself with his latest solo project.

“Is it wrong to say I don’t like this?” Mona asked me.

I laughed and said, “I was just about to say, ‘What the hell is this? Frankie Goes to Radiohead?’ ”

I detest euro disco and this was an awful indulgent exercise in a great artist trying to act half his age.

But you know what? Good for him. He’s earned it. And I think great artists have to fail now and again to get to that next plateau. I have a theory that if it weren’t for Yorke’s first solo album, Radiohead’s crowning masterpiece, “In Rainbows,” never would have been conceived. It bridged the best of the more accessible Radiohead in “The Bends,” and the more experimental “Kid A,” and topped it off with some of Yorke’s most soulful vocals.

I can’t wait for the next Radiohead record.

Not sure if I can say the same for the next Coachella. Maybe if they get more organized next time I’ll be more inclined to go… and I won’t miss the good stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate…

Ira Kaplan. I told Mona it’s a shame there’s no rock pub machine anymore to tell the world he’s one of the world’s greatest living guitarists. People should think of him on the same level as Jimi or Jimmy — but rock ‘n’ roll is dead and no one cares about elevating musicians into godhood anymore.

Britt Daniel — another vastly underrated guitarist, but I’m more impressed with his songwriting than I am his chops.

Britt put the guitar down for this one. I love his vocal style.

Near the end, when the sun was about down for the count, Britt took off his sunglasses and went for the Marlboro Man look.

I know the quality on these photos aren’t the greatest, but I was standing a football field away with a telephoto lens. I was so excited when I heard the first strains of their opening number — it was like slipping into the hot tub time machine with J Mascis and Thurston to go watch our favorite band.

Yes, the alt-girls still shriek at Malkmus, the dork. I hate him, the bastard.

Frankie says: Relax, Thom, don’t do it.

Taken right before we briskly started the death march through the Gorillaz crowd back to our car. Tell me again why Gorillaz were headlining? Am I missing something or were they a one-hit wonder?

I’ve been asked a few times if I’m going to watch the Super Bowl this year now that the Vikings are out of it. Yeah, sure, I’ll keep an eye on it like I usually do. But most Super Bowl games are lopsided and boring. I actually went bowling last year during the first half of the big game — and posted one of my highest scores, a 214. I got a little interested near the end when the Cardinals made a game of it.Speaking of the Cardinals, that brings me to the latest video masterpiece that Mona and I made. It’s a little retrospective on our trip to Arizona where we saw the Cardinals whip the Vikings. We had discussed earlier in the season flying out to Minnesota for a game — Mona and I enjoy helping each other make some of our little dreams come true. And I’ve long daydreamed about seeing the Vikings in the Metrodome. But it would have cost a lot of money as it’s difficult to fly in to Minnesota. So we came up with the next best idea — a road trip to AZ. So the Vikings lost. I didn’t mind. But we shot some video while we were out there and thought we’d share it with you.

There were a lot of highlights this year — and the trip to Arizona, win or no win, was one of them. Another one was meeting Brent McClanahan, one of the Vikings running backs in the ’70s who competed in three Super Bowls. As I’ve written before, he attended one of the games at Northwood Pizza in Irvine where the Southern California Viking Club meets to watch games and he showed me his rings. They were huge. Just think how big they’d be if they’d won.

Well, I’m also a Cubs fan so “wait till next year” is always my motto. If we woo Brett back we could get another shot at the big one. Here’s hoping we will.

I get asked this all the time: You grew up in Chicago, so why are you a Vikings fan?

My Chicago friends have a tad different way of phrasing the question — just insert various expletives wherever appropriate.

Anyway, it’s not that complicated. No one in my immediate family cared much for sports. My two older brothers didn’t like sports and my father, well, he didn’t follow sports much, though, later in life when he got sober he took joy in casually following the teams I liked. But I suspect he was cheering me on more than anything.

So that explains why I had no one to nudge me toward the Bears, but it still doesn’t explain my purple-and-gold passion. That, I’m sorry to say, Bears fans, is your fault. Back in the ’70s when I was a kid the Bears were so pitiful they couldn’t sell out their games and, consequently, the games were blacked out on TV. Instead, the networks carried the Vikings, a franchise then dominating the NFC with the legendary Purple People Eaters and unsackable quarterback Fran Tarkenton, who, despite his diminutive stature, managed to elude tacklers like Charlie Chaplain fleeing keystone cops.

Fascinating isn’t the right word — I was more spellbound than anything. In fact, I think my acumen at eluding my pursuers in games of Kill The Guy in those backyards when I was a kid was inspired by my hero worship of Tark. No one, I mean, no one could catch me. I usually just gave up and tossed the ball to someone else when I got bored. That was a good skill to have considering how many kids wanted to pound me for rooting for the Vikings — oh, and the Cubs, too. Remember, I grew up on the South Side — Sox country.

My point is, I know what it’s like to be in hostile territory. And I certainly know all about rivals.
But when Brett Favre, he of the hated Green Bay Packers flirted with the Vikings last year, I rejoiced. I didn’t care about the rivalry anymore. I knew he could get us to the Super Bowl, something I’ve waited 33 long years to experience again.

The last time, after the 1976 season, the Oakland Raiders thrashed the Vikings. I can still recall southpaw Kenny Stabler just surgically carving up the Vikings secondary. Forget that fierce pass rush that terrorized so many teams in the ’70s. Snake didn’t care. And on and on it went until the Raiders won 32-14, the most lopsided loss in Super Bowl history at the time. To think it was played in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena where I would move a quarter-century later is still an odd coincidence to me.

As I’ve told Mona, I thought, “Well, there’s always next year.” But there was never a next year. It was the end of the Vikings’ dominance. They had played in three Super Bowls in just four years. The next year they lost in the NFC championship game to the Dallas Cowboys who went on to win the Super Bowl.

After they barely made the playoffs in 1978, Tark hung up his spikes. The Rams, who we had tortured for years, finally beat us and beat us good.

The next time they would get a chance at the Super Bowl would be 1987 when they upset the New Orleans Saints and the San Francisco 49ers. Quarterback Wade Wilson couldn’t complete that pass in the waning seconds to beat Washington, though, and the Redskins went on to win the Super Bowl.
Then there was the shanked kick by Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a field goal all year in 1998, and the 16-1 team fell to the Atlanta Falcons as quarterback Randall Cunningham inexplicably took a knee at the end of regulation, pushing the game into overtime, rather than chuck a bomb to Randy Moss.

I won’t even mention the 41-doughnut debacle of 2000 — it’s still too embarrassing to talk about.
This season I kept wondering were they as good as that 1998 team or even those teams in the 70s? Could they make it to the big game again? Finally, after all those painful disappointments?

Yes, I concluded. And Favre would lead us there.

When Mona and I met 70s Vikings running back Brent McClanahan while watching the Vikings at our weekly hangout with the Southern California Vikings Club in Irvine, I asked him (and his three Super Bowl rings) how well this squad compared to the great teams. He was skeptical. He pointed out how difficult it is to compare eras, especially since Favre’s playbook was vastly more complex than Tarkenton’s. But he wasn’t sold on this team’s chances for the big one.

He was prescient.

I knew they were better than Dallas, and all that rah-rahing for the Cowboys drove me nuts all week, but I held my tongue. Still, I was surprised they won as convincingly as they did.

That boosted my confidence against the Saints, but I was still nervous. I knew turnovers would decide the game and that the Saints, although statistically they have a weak defense, they were an opportunistic bunch that took advantage of other teams’ mistakes.

And that’s what they did on Sunday.

The Vikings outplayed the Saints, but that doesn’t matter. They made terrible gaffes — the 12th man in the huddle (helloooooo Naufahu Tahi, what were you thinking?) will live in Vikings infamy.

But I am here to tell you I refuse to pile on Favre with all those other jilted fans.

Yes, he should have tried to run a few more yards instead of throwing that interception. But he had gotten hammered all game and I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to chuck that rock. He’s no Tarkenton — or Tarvaris Jackson, for that matter — when it comes to scrambling.

And remember, Tahi’s goof-up pushed them five yards back, motivating Favre to try to get a first down.
Yeah, they should have trusted Ryan Longwell to attempt a 55-yard field goal. It would have been unlikely but not utterly impossible.

But all that Monday-morning quarterbacking forgets the most obvious point: Favre put us in position to win that game. He’s the one who set career bests in completion percentage (68.4), quarterback rating (107.2) and fewest interceptions (7) as he threw for 33 TDs and 4,202 yards on the season.
So stop the Favre bashing, Vikings fans. I even heard one idiot who speculated Favre threw the interception on purpose. Puh-leaze.

Maybe he’ll come back next year. I hope so. Either way I hope we find out soon so we can maybe have enough time to put together a trade for Donovan McNabb if Favre prefers to sit on his tractor in Mississippi next year.

Meanwhile, I’ll revel in some good memories this year. I joined the Vikings club with Mona and got to see nearly every game on TV with other Vikings fans. You can’t beat that. And, still more exciting, I saw my first Vikings game in person (with Mona, of course) in Arizona.

I was saddened by Sunday’s loss, but I was nowhere near as crushed as I’ve been in the past. And that one’s easy to explain: I had Mona to console me.

We’re already looking forward to next year no matter what.

I can still vividly recall the dawn of video games, telling Mom I was going to check out the Pong game in electronics as she shopped at Zayres, a department store chain that disappeared generations ago.

Pong was basically a slow-motion electronic version of tennis. Blip, blip — and if you hit it with just the right English — blop!

I know, lame, right?

But it fascinated me at the time much like I imagine fire transfixed early man.

Still, there was something about it that also seemed so boring. The game itself quickly grew tiresome, so the real intrigue involved this feeling that the game represented a sea change — the birth of a new age of technological advancement. The first calculators offered the same promise.

Soon after Pong came digital LED hand-held electronic games and I was a fiend for them. I had baseball, hockey and football games because I was a sports nut. Then came the big leap forward — Pac Man and Asteroids.

Then, of course, the greatest evolutionary milestone — Atari. Video games at home!

For years, I told myself and anyone else forced to listen to my whining, that I hated video games because they killed the pinball machine industry. That wasn’t entirely true I came to realize over the years.

It’s true enough I loved playing pinball machines. And, as a teenager, I was scary good at it — the best in my neighborhood at least. One summer, during a neighborhood pinball wizard contest, I had absolute strangers — kids I’d never met — threaten to decimate my high score. And me, as well. I’ll never forget how one particularly nasty kid kept banging into my elbow “accidentally on purpose” while I played “Star Trek,” my favorite game at the 7/11. I was a patient boy and let it slide, but after a few times I let him know I wasn’t pleased and for that minutes later I got ambushed with a sucker punch so vicious we careened into a stack of Sunday newspapers as he chaotically slammed his fist into my throat while the store clerk frantically tried to restore order.

Yeah, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.

I think it was the same kid some weeks later who arrogantly bragged to me that his friend was laying waste to my high score, which stood for six months, just as I coincidentally walked into that same 7/11. I offered up a Buddha-like smile and congratulations — mostly because I instictively knew that was the best way to irritate them. It worked. He stalked back to his friend, stung with the disappointment of being denied satisfaction.

Knowing better than to push my luck, I waited for them to leave, put a quarter into the machine, which I hadn’t played for weeks because I was bored with it, and leveled their puny high score with ease. I told the clerk to put my name back on top of the game’s display board, as was the custom when one racked up high score.

Petty, I know. But I was 13 years old, OK? (And, speaking of Petty — Tom, that is — I even wrote a feature-length screenplay loosely based on the events of my life that last summer pinball reigned that I titled “Even the Losers.”)

So, yeah, I jumped on my bike with my pals and rode up to the neighborhood arcade to play Pac Man, etc., knowing even at that time that those games would destroy my beloved pinball. Why? Because I’m an early adopter. I love new technology. I just don’t slavishly adore it. You still have to win me over. And over the years I grew less interested in video games even as my generation dug in deeper with Nintendo, Sega and later XBox and PlayStation.

Why? Well, because, frankly, I suck at most of them.

As good as I was at pinball, I was that bad at the video games. It was rare I could master any of them. I was particularly lousy at Pac Man. Still am. And let me tell you, it’s no fun when an 8-year-old nephew can kick your ass at Wii (though since I got one myself and have had time to practice I think I might ask for a rematch. On second thought, he’s 11 now. I might get hurt).

So one evening recently when Mona wondered aloud if we should check out a flight simulator in Anaheim I thought, why not? Should be fun. I love doing just about anything with her, but I really  dig how she’ll come up with these quirky escapades.

I was also a little worried. If I can’t even figure out your average PlayStation flight-simulator game, how am I going to do in a real one?

When we arrived, they had us put on real-enough looking flight suits. Hoo boy. This was serious business. They even had a pre-flight briefing … in a separate room! Yikes! I’m going to get embarrassed big time.

I wish I could say this is one of those improbable stories when the protagonist defies all the odds and puts in a superhuman performance. But then I’d be lying. I was awful. The worst of the bunch. Hell, even Mona shot me down once — with relish!

I got zero kills, I think. I crashed my plane on the runway. I mostly flew around in circles like a demented sharecropper on qualudes.

Still, it was fun. Even when I was wiping out at Galaga or Frogger or Dig Dug back in the day, it was all good. I was with my friends, just hanging out.

And there’s nothing more fun than that, now is there?

So we made it to Arizona the night before the big game: Vikes vs. the Cards. Mona and I decided to check out sack-specialist Jared Allen’s bar in Scottsdale and found that, like most bars, it was full of inebriated people. We didn’t stay long since we don’t drink, but while we there we met some interesting characters. The video says it all…

This holiday weekend was a little like fumbling the ball and having it bounce back up in your hands.

Well, not really.

My alma mater, Marist High School, finally made it back to the state championships for the first time since 1986 and, unlike back then, I was actually able to watch the game. (I love the Internets). But just like 23 years ago they got stomped by some suburban public school. Some things never change.

But that was Saturday. Then came Sunday and I got to watch my beloved Vikings basically end the season for my hometown Bears.

So the sports universe balances itself out.

For instance, on Saturday I watched Maine South High School’s Matt Perez run wild all over Marist. It was like watching Clark Kent in “Smallville” holding back his super powers. I mean, 316 yards and 5 touchdowns? I told Mona no one will ever eclipse that record. Except maybe in the year 2020 when they let cyborgs play. Maybe Matt Perez IS a cyborg, I surmised.

Then on Sunday I got the benefit of having the proverbial Matt Perez play for MY team. Brett Favre. Once he was the Matt Perez who tortured me as a Green Bay Packer. Now he’s in a purple jersey just handing it to Duh Bears. And I love it.

I hope my Marist RedHawks (I still have trouble getting used to that — when I went there they were the very un PC Redskins) can bounce back next year, but I won’t hold my breath. They are the Chicago Cubs of high school football after all. They rarely veer that close to sports nirvana. The Vikes have the same reputation, although with much more regular season and playoff success, but like the Cubs they always find a way to choke it away at the last moment. If they don’t this year it’ll be because we have Matt Perez on our side for once.

Go Vikings. Next week, Mona and I will be in Arizona and we’ll have a lot more video for you. She’s getting scary good with the iMovie skills — we’ll try to add more surprises next week.

Mona and I have been having fun watching my beloved Vikings play in this magical season and we chronicled some of the tomfoolery this past Sunday. Each week we go to a closed party at a pizza joint in Irvine. First of all, what’s truly ironic about all this is I’ve gotten to see more Vikings games this season than I ever did as a bachelor. But what’s even more amazing is I’m finally going to realize a dream soon that I’ve had for years — to see my Purple People Eaters live and in person at a real game.

Growing up in Chicago it was impossible to get tickets to see the Bears, especially against a rival like the Vikings so I never got a chance to see them. In recent years I thought about flying out to Minnesota and Mona and I discussed plans along those lines this year, but the air fares were really steep. It’s not easy getting to the Twin Cities. Then, through our Southern California Vikings Club, there was an effort to get a group of us to go see the Vikes play the Cardinals in Arizona. So we went for it. And Dec. 6 I’ll be there. The NFL just made it the Sunday Night Football game so it shows how far my much-ignored Minnesotans have come — they’re centerstage as their Hall-of-Fame QB leads them to a possible…. dare I say it? …. Super Bowl!

Anyway, enjoy this nonsense — and we’ll do plenty of blogging/vlogging from Arizona (including a much-anticipated visit to Jared Allen’s bar there), so stay tuned to the continuing adventures of Mona and Paul.

P.S. I hope I live down the use of that cheesey REO Speedwagon song in the video. It works perfectly as it relates to the general cheesiness of our favorite mullet-donning, Walmart-shopping, NASCAR-watching football player, No. 69, but, geez, not only did the band’s singer go to my crosstown rival, Brother Rice (Go Marist High in the state championship this weekend!) ….. OK, I’ll stop ranting there. I never could say no to Mona. I’m grateful for much this Thanksgiving, but she’s right at the top of the list, for sure. (Speaking of cheesey, can you believe I tried to buy that satin Vikings jacket shown above for her at last Sunday’s game?).