Monday's Margarita - a homecoming of sorts...camo optional

If you're a regular around these parts, you know I married well. Mrs. Bernie not only is a damn good Dawg, she's beautiful and makes me a full breakfast each and every morning. (Two of those are actually true. And I dare you to tell her to her face she doesn't look smokin' hawt in her red and black gameday attire.)

Honor, obey...and to
vertical clap!

Back on topic, I'm going to try and protect the innocent while calling out the guilty. Always a daunting task after being marked by maker's, but I'm up for the challenge. The wife has some poor souls in her family that ventured down to the jort capital of the world this weekend for a wedding. Being from Virginia my in-laws aren't familiar with the eclectic ways of the reptilian brood. Awkward testaments...the 106% humidity...mullet majorities...


I found her a few days ago talking to her kind, unsuspecting family. Turns out for this wedding, there were no invitations, other than ones that were emailed. No seriously...there's more. And if you dressed casually you'd stick out like a sore thumb. Who needs a wedding dress or tuxedos? They were going for a kind of a come as you are feel. No it ain't in the Univ. of floriDuh chapel Darlene, we're just gonna gather outside of it for when Cooter able to git there.


Big surprise right? She spent the next several minutes warning them about the jorts per capita and the likelihood that the bride would show up with a Shaeffer's Light in one hand. The wedding was supposed to be Saturday, sometime after the groom's best man (and father) went before the parole board. We have yet to hear from them all. I hope they enjoyed the St. Timmy the Tebow ice sculpture. I hear it's beautiful this time of year.


And surely it wouldn't melt...before the bride said "C'mon Coot, we got to git back to the swamp holler 'for the tater tots defrost".

Today's Ingredients

• Father's Day is coming up. For the ladies out there, why not a copy of Belue to Scott by Robbie Burns?
• What a day yesterday! Kudos to the men's golf team for making the NCAA finals against Augusta State. Just came up short.
• And then the Diamond Dawgs...went well into the night, but fell to Oregon State's mightiest beavers and their overdue power bill.
• Here was my initial thoughts from Phil Steele's 2011 preview.
• the Senator dug deep in his college preview too over the weekend and found even more reason for the engiNerds to celebrate.
• Reuben Foster was more than a little impressed ($$) by the attention he received in Athens recently.
• Some good countdowns going on this time of year as usual. H2H has a post on Matthew DeGenova (I love any post on a scout teamer) and Streit has a legendary 2002 play queued up for you.
• Speaking of 2002, Mike weighs in pretty heavily based on an afternoon of 2002 tape viewing. To sum up: We owned the 4th quarter. Enough said. We were quite simply a meaner, hungrier, better team in Richt's first 5 seasons.
• ecdawg finds some confusion in the new oversigning rules. And Chris Low explains some of the loopholes as well.
• As the product of a Clempson family, I can more than relate to Garbin's latest post.
• The legends and the losers will still meet in Indianapolis to decide who gets to lose in the Rose Bowl.
• While we're in the land of the slow and the tatt'd up, Matt Hinton captures some of the high drama and tears as Jimmy Tressel left town...a true hero!
• And hold onto your love seats folks...things appear to be unraveling in Morgantown. You know, more than usual.

Sometimes guys are just destined to meet, share a moment in time...hunker down a spell. I realized this most recently when I ventured down a bourbon aisle in a liquor store in Boulder Colorado and looked up to see some guy in a Georgia shirt saying "Hey Bernie!". So last night I raised a glass to Exile. It's not everyday a Dawg gets to do what he did this weekend.

Cheers, dude! Hope your rug isn't
stolen. It really tied the room together.

When I first entered the Dawgosphere it was a blogger lost in a cornfield that I found first. Sure, there was PWD and the Senator to read. But a young blogger needed more. And Exile was there. His thoughts were fresh and unencumbered by proximity yet still flavored heavily by locality. After years and years of reading Grizzard, when I travel I'm always eager to find someone who talks like I think. In the Dawgosphere, Exile was that dude.

And he abided in the cornfields and the snow for nearly 5 years. He grilled in subzero temperatures while his neighbors laughed, covered in their B1G Ten blankets. He hunkered down in the land of of the great white north, stirring his grits and barking louder than ever. I get that. It warms the cockles of my silver britches.

We can scoff at people like Exile, while they cling to their Georgia driveway flags that they free from 3 inches of snow in May!!!. We can look down our southern noses at them and think they've lost touch somehow, that they've forgotten what it feels like to join hands with 93000 people when Auburn needs 2 yards in the middle of November. But the truth is it never leaves us Dawg fans. It stays inside us like a carefully thrown ball into a checkboard and creamsickled endzone. Michael Johnson no more dropped that pass on the Plains than people like Exile forget how to bark.

I don't think he'd mind me telling ya I've known this day was coming for a few months. Ironically I had a driveway full of snow when I found out the blog Bulldog in Exile's days were numbered. I've been thrilled for him and his family ever since. But I'll wait a few days weeks months before I remove the bookmark from my Dawg Blogs folder.

Pardon me, got a little something in my eye there. Welcome home Dawg!! Snow shovels are still optional. And God still talks like we do.

Now you go and make this Monday sumpin special Reader. I've got a beach sand waiting on my toes!

Bernie