On my way home from softball practice last night, I called Christi and while we were talking, someone rang the doorbell. So she answered the door, then called back. It was a younger kid trying to raise money for his baseball team. Nine times out of ten, we're a great house to come up to if you're raising money for anything baseball related, but instead of selling candy or magazines this kid was selling ... Omaha Steaks coupons.

Christi politely told him that we are originally from Omaha and that we actually have Omaha Steaks in our freezer right now. Hopefully our neighbors thought it was cool to get Omaha Steaks coupons.

Instead of just heading straight to The Dunk, we decided to make a few detours in the morning. We went to go check out the mansions and the amazing shoreline in Newport, RI. All of us would recommend anyone to check out the Newport Bridge on the way to Flo's Clam Shack.

We heard this was a great place to eat on the Food Network, so we popped in to see how much food they could fit on a tray. After taking a goofy pic on the way out the door, we were back on our way to Providence to watch our last two games.

It pays to talk to people because the guy collecting parking money at the stadium remembered us and hooked us up with an even closer spot than we had a few days before.

We walked in with our huge tickets thinking the best thing we would look forward to would be listening to the Ohio band and playing the new dollar game we learned on Thursday.

We saw six guys holding big wads of dollar bills that were flying around every 30 seconds or so. Midway through the games, we asked what they were betting on, and everyone had a number. If the clock stopped on your number, you collected. Ben and I joined in on the game and I think we got hooked for the rest of our lives.

The excitement continued as we saw Saint Mary's upset Villanova and then Tennessee dismantle Ohio. In six total games we saw three upsets, a 15 almost knock off a 2 and a few players rise above the rest like Omar Samhan. Omar was absolutely unstoppable in both games and even earned me a few dollar bets between myself and Ben.

Unfortunately the weekend had to come to an end and the Vankats traveled back to Omaha. All in all, we were glad won the lottery last May and that the two of them were able to come out and hang out with us in Connecticut. I guess we'll just wait to see where the first round games are next year and see if we want to do this madness all over again.

Taking advantage of the weather, that reached up to 70°, Ben and I took to the Rockledge golf course to see how many shots we could rack up on our first round of the year. Before being able to tee off, the starter pairs us with two other people and introduces both of them by full name to me, which I thought was a little strange at the time. After seeing how good these guys were, and after Ben did his due diligence on following up on them, we figured out why they were introduced by their full names. Billy Grogan and Pete Davison are the '08 senior winner and course record holder, respectively. Nothing like having our first time out in 2010 with some of the best golfers in Connecticut.

After that, we regrouped with the girls after they shopped all morning and headed to ESPN for a tour. As a special bonus to Ben and Steph, I was able to get them into a live taping of SportsNation and it was a great experience. Michelle Beadle and Colin Cowherd were great with Michelle telling us she's been to a Red Lobster in Kearney (yeah, random) and Colin telling us how he loves the Old Market. Christi, Stephanie and Ben's left leg were lucky enough to be shown on TV.

We went home to make some surf and turf, watch some more basketball games and get some rest before our final day of games.

Ben and Stephanie came up to visit for the week and watch some NCAA tournament games. Talking with Ben, he said he's lost track and couldn't remember how many straight years he's been to the first round of the tournament. It was either seven or eight ... all at a different venue each time. For Christi and I, it was our first and I'm not sure if we could have picked a better year to go. After we got back home from our first day of games (10am-2am), we hear everyone saying that it was the single greatest day in the tournament's history.

The goal was to get to the games early on our first day so that we could find some parking and get to know our way around. There was virtually no traffic until we were about four blocks away, and were promptly told the massive mall parking garage was completely full. After having someone yell, "You need to stop, because it's a state law" after he jumped in front of the Jeep, we drove right by the stadium and saw a sign for parking. We parked about as close as we could. A good 20 yards away.

Before we could walk 10 feet, we were stopped by a ProJo (Providence Journal) reporter who was shocked that people came all the way from Nebraska without a real team to root for. The ProJo becomes another person on our lifelong list who can't pronounce/spell our name right, and Ben was a good sport by being the spokesman for the four of us. Hopefully Ben has the alternate picture of us taking a picture of him before we walked in.

We opened our day at the Dunkin Donuts Center watching Robert Morris trying to make history. Coming into the day, 15 seeds were 4-88 all-time against 2 seeds. The Colonials gave 'Nova all they can handle by taking them to overtime and nearly pulling an upset in front of a heavily Big East crowd.

After all the excitement we thought we would be prepared for, Saint Mary's upset Richmond, Ohio destroyed Georgetown and Tennessee barely escaped San Diego State, we were glad to drive home to not stare at any more creepy mascots. I'm not sure what a Gael is, but I really don't want to find out after looking at that guy.

The positive note on the day was that I had my single greatest opening round bracket day by going 12-4.

It feels good. It feels really good to be done with the bathroom project. It's nice to just finally take a step back and look at everything that was done and know I don't have to work on it anymore ... I hope. The best part, is that it's completely done before Ben and Steph come up for the NCAA tournament. We'll actually have something to show off instead of saying, "please excuse the mess." Personally, I think Christi is more pumped to have her hallway back. It was kind of my catch-all place to dump all of my tools and extra things that I needed for the project.

A few people have looked at the before pictures and said the previous bathroom was in pretty good shape. While true, it didn't have a tiled floor and it was a lot of fun to just go out on whim and completely demo something without really knowing what I was getting myself into. It was a great learning experience if nothing else.

Now it's time to fill up on water and come over to, err, try out the new bathroom. If you want to just look from afar, here's what was done:

• Over view picture.
• Picture of the new light fixture, mirror and vanity that were installed.
• The floating shelf that actually floats, as opposed to falling.
• Close up of the new light fixture.
• The new faucet.
• Top of the vanity.
• Vanity close up.

The bathroom project was supposed to be a nice quick upgrade for the house. I originally planned on having everything completed within a two week window. Since Christi was back home for exactly two weeks, I figured this would be perfect. However, I started a week late, so I was only about seven days into the renovation when she came home. Not blaming her or anything, but when she came home, she just wanted us both to relax, so I took a few nights off of working on stuff. A few nights turned into a few weekends which turned into a few weeks.

In the meantime, since Christi more or less made me (once again, not blaming her here) buy the tile cutter, others found out that I knew how to tile. This was one of the first times in life when I really found out how contagious knowledge was. Pacino just bought a 3 family house and wanted to rip up the vinyl flooring in his kitchen and lay down some tile. So I spent pretty much one entire weekend helping him out. I'm glad I did because his kitchen looks amazing, but in terms of our house, it was time away from the bathroom. However, being that it's our second bath, I figured helping Pacino get his place into shape was a little higher on the priority chart.

I've been working on and off lazily over the past few weeks or so, but really kicked it back into gear about a few days ago. Everything was done. I was satisfied, but not entirely happy with everything. There was one final touch that was missing: a floating shelf on the wall. On one of our shopping trips at Target, I saw some there and picked one up to complete everything.

We left to go meet up for dinner with some friends and when we came back, the Humpty Dumpty effect came into place. Yes, all of the king's soldiers and all of the king's men couldn't put my floating shelf back together again.

The picture rundown:

• The support where the floating shelf was supposed to go.
• One of the decorative glass pieces broke on the tile when it hit the ground.
• The shelf was chipped and cracked everywhere and completely useless.