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Last April 28, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living-room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual N.F.L. draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. As big a football fan as I am, I had never seen any part of a draft, to say nothing of its final four rounds, which are a roughly seven-hour marathon that lasts until sundown. And yet, on that day, I sat riveted.
I had in front of me what's known as a Draft Scout Player Profile: a starkly efficient, computerized summation of every draftable player's past prowess and future prospects. I, however, was interested in only one, my nephew, my younger sister's son. His specs were, of course, familiar to me. But somehow the officious, bare-bones alignment on my computer screen — in categories befitting a prize steer at auction — rendered him a complete stranger. And a rather impressive one at that.
Name: Pat Schiller. Number: 53. Position: Outside linebacker. Height: 6-foot-1. Weight: 234. College: Northern Illinois. Under "Pro Day Results" — his audition, essentially, before several N.F.L. scouts at the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University earlier in March — were 22 bench presses of 225 pounds, a 35-inch vertical leap and, for a linebacker, a head-turning 4.65 seconds in the 40-yard dash. Under his "Draft Scout Snapshot" was a link to game-highlight footage: a rapid-fire sequence of heat-seeking-missile launches into ball carriers; the all-out, "high-motor" mode of play that garnered No. 53 a team-leading 115 tackles in his senior year, along with second-team All Mid-American Conference and Northern Illinois's Linebacker of the Year honors. As for Pat's "Projected Round," there was, after the word "stock," a bright red, upward-pointing arrow, followed by the words "shot late."
Some 800 miles west, meanwhile, in a two-story modern colonial on a neatly etched cul-de-sac in the western Chicago suburb Geneva, Pat lay on the living-room carpet, holding his golden retriever, Champ. Around the TV with him was his immediate family: his father, also named Pat, a longtime excavation contractor as well as an accomplished pianist and songwriter in the Billy Joel mode, with a couple CDs to his credit and a No. 6 single on a 2004 adult-contemporary-music radio chart; Pat's mother, my younger sister, Cathy, a doctor's medical assistant; my niece, Stephanie, a classically trained vocalist who now works in the admissions office at Northern Illinois University, her alma mater as well; and her fiancé, Michael. My nephew, my sister had told me, wanted to keep things low-key, wanted to avoid the roomful of slack faces and well-meaning condolences should things not go as hoped.
He was, in a sense, already chosen. Of the 80,000 or so who play college football every year, no more than 1,500 are even scouted by pro teams. On average about 300 of those players will be invited to show their stuff at the weeklong N.F.L. scouting combine held every February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Hundreds more will perform at regional combines or at their college team's pro days. Among the heads Pat turned was that of Ran Carthon, son of the New York Giants fullback Maurice Carthon. Ran Carthon was also a former N.F.L. running back before becoming a scout for the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons called Pat four times in the previous week alone, the final call coming that Saturday morning.
"Stay by your phone for Rounds 6 and 7," he was told.
What followed was a slow-motion combo to the gut. The Falcons' sixth-round pick went to Charles Mitchell, a safety out of Mississippi State. In Round 7, they took Travian Robertson, a defensive tackle from the University of South Carolina. Four picks later, the Indianapolis Colts took as the draft's last selection Chandler Harnish, the quarterback at Northern Illinois and my nephew's close friend and college housemate.
"The room went kind of quiet," Pat told me. "There was like this skipped heartbeat. And then the waiting started all over again."
Seconds after the official N.F.L. draft ends, a whole other nether-draft begins, one far more frenzied and dramatic than the one at Radio City. From 1967, the year the N.F.L. instituted a joint draft with the more recently established American Football League, until 1976, the draft went 17 rounds, with about 450 players being selected. The current seven-round format totals about 250, leaving a vast countrywide bin of talented discards that general managers, coaches and scouts start madly ferreting through, like a group of shoppers who have been granted a limited after-hours spree for bargain-basement gems.
Not two minutes after Harnish's selection that day, Pat's phone rang. Ran Carthon was on the line. The Falcons wanted him.
"The truth is," said Dave Lee, Pat's agent, a partner of PlayersRep based in Cleveland, "when you get toward the bottom of the draft, basically from the fifth to the seventh round, the talent level isn't all that different from that of the undrafted free agents. Teams at that point are just looking for guys that fit their system, and it's anybody's guess whether you'll get drafted or not. The Falcons wanted speedy linebackers. Pat shows a lot of speed. They said, 'We think it's a great opportunity.' They went through the reasons. Obviously we said, 'We're getting other calls,' so we could play a bit with the signing bonus, but it was pretty easy to jump on their offer."
A contract was soon faxed to the Schillers' home, its terms at once bleak and beguiling. Up front, Pat would receive just a $1,000 signing bonus, along with per diem expenses of $155 during spring camp. Should he make it as far as preseason training camp beginning in late July, the payment would be the N.F.L. Players Association's stipulated $850 a week. The big money, big for a rookie at least, was all in the offing: the standard first-year salary of $390,000 he receives only if he makes and remains on the 53-man roster for the entire season. Should he be picked for the team's eight-man practice squad instead, he would receive a salary of $5,700 a week, amounting to $96,900 over a 17-week season and more if the Falcons made the playoffs.
Pat and Dave Lee were encouraged by the fact that the Falcons hadn't picked any linebackers in the official draft. The team did, however, sign three other undrafted linebackers and a total of 23 undrafted free agents in all, the most of any team in the N.F.L. In the end, 623 undrafted free agents were signed in 2012 to the same basic contract that arrived at the Schillers' home that evening. It all seems wildly prodigal. But not in terms of breaking owners' bank accounts so much as players' hearts. Two, maybe three, of the undrafted free agents annually signed by each N.F.L. team will make the 53-man roster. Of the 23 undrafted players on the Falcons roster at the start of last season's minicamp, one player made the roster.
With a signed contract in hand that Saturday evening, my nephew descended the stairs to the family's finished basement to use the fax machine in his father's music studio. The Falcons ask that their players send such contracts back before midnight. It's the undrafted free agent's peculiar inversion of the Cinderella tale: having to rush to ensure the right to arrive at the N.F.L.'s ball in a pumpkin.
Six weeks later, his sculptured frame blurring in the gridiron-warble of a Georgia June sun, Pat was standing on the Atlanta Falcons' practice field in Flowery Branch, learning the consequences of living his dream. Midway through the Falcons' six weeks of spring-training sessions — each N.F.L. team's yearly padless orientation ritual — Pat had just got what all first-year players in the N.F.L. most crave: a play, a "rep." Reps for a rookie are but a few precious crumbs left after the daily scrums of the first and second teams — the "Ones" and "Twos." It's one of the crueller realities of the N.F.L.'s strictly enforced hierarchy, a classic Catch-22: what you most need in order to make a team as a rookie, especially an undrafted one, are opportunities to show what you can do. You have little chance of getting those, however, precisely because you're a rookie. There are so few chances, in fact, that when a rep does come your way, the tendency is to get a bit greedy, to overplay.
Mike Nolan, a former defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, Jets and five other N.F.L. teams before being hired by Atlanta last winter, had just signaled for the "Threes," with Pat at middle linebacker or "Mike," to execute a "Dallas freeze," a package featuring two blitzing linebackers. As one of the scheme's designated blitzers, Pat shot toward the quarterback then deftly swerved inside a blocking fullback to get at his target. Another head-turning display, although in this instance for entirely the wrong reasons. Coaches love speed. They love schemes even more, and in that one Pat was designated to be the "contain man." His responsibility was to go outside the blocking back to prevent the play from developing wide.
"Give me two good reasons," Nolan's voice boomed, "why you went inside."
Pat went slack beneath a bowed helmet, then shrugged.
"That's right!" Nolan replied. "Because there aren't any!"
Over dinner that evening at the nearby Legacy Lodge on Lake Lanier, where the Falcons were staying throughout spring camp, that play came up, just as it would, Pat assured me, at team meetings the following morning.
"I heard 'freeze,' " Pat said, "so I knew I was going to be one of the blitzers. I got that. But I treated it like a normal blitz, where you find any way you can to the quarterback. I didn't realize I was the contain player. Unfortunately, in this league, you don't get many chances, and that's a blitz I'd only run maybe twice in the three weeks that I've been here. So you do all these things right and then you mess up the last one, and you're getting yelled at. N.F.L. coaches will tolerate physical mistakes but not mental ones."
Weeks earlier, when I first mentioned to Pat the possibility of my writing a story about his attempt to make the Falcons as an undrafted free agent, he was open to the idea. His time in N.F.L. camp, however, had altered his outlook. He called me the night before I got on a plane to go down to Atlanta.
"I think you might be wasting your time," he said. "I mean you can still come down, but the story really can't be about me anymore. I'm mostly just going to meetings and trying to learn the playbook. I'm kind of nobody around here."
He paused a moment.
"Let's see . . . how do I put this? You go from being one of the top players in college. O.K. not one of the top. If I were that, I would have been drafted. But I would say one of the top three to four hundred players. And then you come to the N.F.L. and, well, I've never felt so bad at a sport I know I'm good at."
He still looked a bit beleaguered as we sat at the dinner table at Legacy Lodge. A pained twist of his torso and head roll elicited an inner ball-bearing rumble. I noted over the years the Hulk-like morphing of my nephew's body toward the formidable adult frame that presently houses the same sensitive, soft-spoken kid. But at age 23, football's ravages had him constantly making his own chiropractic adjustments. There was no thought, he said, of seeking out a trainer. Everything a rookie does in camp is documented, and visits to the training room leave the wrong impression.
"We have an expression here," he told me. " 'You don't make the club in the tub."'
I had always followed Pat's progress from afar, heard the hopeful murmurings about him "playing on Sundays." And yet it was only now that I was getting a chance to really spend time with the guy. Watching his contortions that night, I started feeling guilty about my own delight in his achievements. I didn't know whether to give him a pep talk or the suddenly more urgent seeming advice, given the very slim odds of his realizing his dream, to get out while he was still intact, both in body and in mind.
I thought of the conversation I recently had with his father about the constant threat of injury to his son, who had already overcome a badly shattered ankle in his freshman year of high school and a torn knee ligament at the start of his junior year at Northern Illinois.
"I don't think of the knees and hips," Pat's father told me. "They can replace those now. The thing I'm most worried about is his brain. I've been reading a lot lately about concussions."
My nephew told me that night that he had his share of concussions over the years but said he was never forced to leave a game or miss part of a season because of one.
"I've had it where I've been hit, and the lights go out," he said. "You stand up, and it's like, 'Whew,' and then you're good. I've also had it two or three times where a play will be called and you have no idea what it is or what to do, and you're just out there aimlessly wandering around the field. But it's never been to the point where I wake up the next morning really sensitive to light or I'm getting sick from it."
Another torso twist and head roll.
"You do get to this point," he told me, "where you feel your body is telling you to chill out, take a break, but your mind stays on the prize. And part of that now is the paycheck. What gets me through coaches screaming at me and the way my body feels is the thought of that $390,000. I've talked to other guys here about it, like, 'Is that O.K. to feel that way,' and they're like, 'Oh, man, don't even think twice about that.' "
I knew that when he was a sophomore at Northern Illinois and still living at home, he witnessed firsthand the effects of the recent financial meltdown. His father told me that late in 2007 and into the first two months of 2008, he was still receiving a number of job bids, and his bank repeatedly asked him if he needed a higher line of credit. By March, though, clients weren't able to pay him. He turned to the bank for the higher credit line, but by then the bank was drastically reducing his credit: cards with a $50,000 limit were cut to $2,000. By the fall of 2008, work had completely dried up, and Pat had no other choice but to close his business. To pay off his debts, he got whatever he could for his bulldozers, backhoes and trucks at unrestricted auctions, $200,000 machines going for as little as $50,000. He was soon getting up at 4 a.m. to drive backhoes at distant work sites.
"It's tough seeing your dad break down," Pat told me when I brought up the subject at dinner that night. "His name was now coming off the building he owned. Everything he'd worked for was gone. Everything you've seen in our house, all the nice stuff. That's an illusion. He can't really afford it anymore. He keeps it going for us. I remember thinking when everything was coming apart for him, O.K., I've got to help in some way. What am I good at that could also pay decent money? Well, I knew the answer to that one."
Being an undrafted free agent in the N.F.L. is an extended exercise in ego abnegation. You're not only stripped of your college number; you're exiled from the N.F.L.'s mandated numerical bracket for your given position. Linebackers on all final team rosters must bear a number in either the 50s or 90s. Pat, for now, was given 45. As for his fellow undrafted competitors, Max Gruder, a linebacker from the University of Pittsburgh, wore 46; Rico Council, a middle linebacker from Tennessee State, 43; and Jerrell Harris, an outside linebacker for last year's champions, Alabama, 49. Some days in practice, Pat wore 40 and then was switched back to 45. Coaches and fellow players, meanwhile, were constantly confusing Pat with a third-year safety, Shann Schillinger, whose seniority naturally merited his getting dibs on the nickname "Schill," thus saddling my nephew with — for obscure reasons — "Patty Melt."
Nolan kept calling Pat "Gruder" through much of minicamp. In a practice roundup in The Atlanta Journal Constitution one morning, my nephew — whom I watched the previous day grunt, sweat and double over with the rest of the squad — was listed as absent. After he made five tackles in the Falcons' second preseason game against the Cincinnati Bengals later in August — finally turning coaches' heads for the right reasons — the team statistician, apparently confused by the presence of two number 45s on the roster that night, credited Pat with none.
"Well," Pat told me on the phone later, "at least they can't erase my film. Can they?"
After one workout that spring, all the undrafted linebackers were headed back to the locker room with an extra helmet in hand bearing numbers in the 50s.
"Yep," Gruder said, smiling. "We're also the vets' helmet lackeys."
And water boys. At team meetings each morning, before taking their seats in the very front row — the better for the coach's eviscerating explications of rookie screw-ups — the 40s brigade takes water and Gatorade to the veterans. The Falcons' linebacker coach, Glenn Pires, told a story one morning from his days coaching for the Arizona Cardinals. The vets sat up front at the Cardinals' team meetings, the rookies in the far back. Pires said a longtime veteran linebacker there had only to hold up a hand: one finger meant water, two Gatorade, three a cup of coffee.
Of course, getting things for vets is standard rookie boot-camp stuff. Getting any time with one of them is the real challenge. At practices each day, the Threes are forever pacing the sidelines, craning their heads to at least get mental images of the plays being run by the Ones and Twos. They sidle up to them afterward with questions. It's as though rookies are kept penned in a mental cage of the playbook schemes they've been studying from the start of camp. You can almost hear the whirring of all the Xs, Os, arrows and bent-Ts inside their helmets, like so many gnats they would love to have swatted away with one good hit.
"They give you all this information," Jerrell Harris told me after one practice. "But without the actual reps, if you don't pick things up off the mental, then you're just out there flying around."
I always heard that rookies are overwhelmed at first by the speed of the game at the pro level. But everyone I asked about this had the same response.
"It's not the speed," the third-year linebacker Robert James told me. "It only seems like the game is a lot faster because you're always trying to figure out what you're doing and where you're supposed to be. Once I began to learn the defenses, the game slowed down for me."
Much of the learning in the N.F.L. begins with unlearning. In college, Pat told me, coaches stressed never crossover running with your feet so that you can keep your depth and be available to make a play. In the pros they tell you to crossover run.
"It's no longer 'keep your depth.' " Pat said. "In the N.F.L., everything is downhill right now. Get to the ball as fast as you can. Those things you perfected to a T in college are no good here."
For Pat and the other free-agent linebackers, what made the N.F.L. learning curve especially steep was the lack of extra time on the side with coaches.
"You don't get the patient schooling of college here," Bart Scott, a Pro Bowl linebacker now with the New York Jets, who started out as an undrafted free agent, told me by phone. "It's mostly on you to find ways to figure it out. To be mature. To be a man."
I asked Scott what advice he would give Pat.
"Get with a vet and track him," he said. "Everything he does. Learn it. Copy it. Then try to outdo it."
The one veteran Pat said he had begun to bond with was the three-time Pro Bowl linebacker Lofa Tatupu. The Falcons had just signed Tatupu, the 29-year-old former Seattle Seahawk, to a two-year, $3.6 million contract to shore up the Mike position after losing their star middle linebacker, Curtis Lofton, to free agency.
"We've been out to dinner a few times," Pat said. "A movie. He's so generous. Doesn't let me pay for anything. We were shooting pool here the other night, and somehow we got to talking about my highlight tape. We went up to my room to watch, and he's like, 'Hey, you got speed, man.' Then he told me: 'Look, you're a rookie. You can't control what you can't control. I've seen lots of guys who should have made it get cut. The only thing you can control is what you do when you go in there.' "
At the Lodge one evening a few days before the close of spring camp, Tatupu stopped by our table, dwarfing it with his mesalike shoulders. His injured hamstring, he told Pat, was going to keep him out of tomorrow's practice, and Akeem Dent, the Falcons' current starting middle linebacker, would be away as well, tending to some personal business at home.
"You're getting lots of reps with the Ones tomorrow, rook," Tatupu said, heading off to his room. "Better study your playbook tonight."
It had been maddeningly difficult to get any indication of how Pat was doing outside of the occasional tongue lashings in practice. I had an agreement with both Pat and the Falcons' communications coordinator, Brian Cearns, that I wouldn't tell Mike Smith, the head coach, or any of the other coaches that I was Pat's uncle or ask them specific questions about his performance. I knew my share of football coaches in the past and could well imagine the guff Pat might get if word got around camp that the no-name undrafted rookie had a reporter uncle following him.
When I asked Pat for his own assessment of his play, he just shrugged.
"It's hard to get a good measure," he said. "You don't hear anything about the good stuff. That's just the way it is here."
At the following practice, Pat got the promised reps with the Ones. It was always easy to tell when just the Threes were on the field. You couldn't hear anything. Everybody was unsure of what they were doing, and so nobody talked. Now the vets were giving Pat his checks, he was chattering back to them, and, with the doors to his mind's playbook-cage flung open, he was looking again like the guy in his own highlight reel; briefly playing in that realm of informed thoughtlessness that had turned scouts' heads in the first place.
Driving his gray pickup back home in Geneva during a break a few weeks after the close of minicamp, Pat popped in a CD. He wanted me to hear the motivational music he listens to before games or personal workout sessions like the one we were driving to that July morning at the ProForce training facility in Batavia, the adjacent town. He still had another couple of weeks off before the start of padded, preseason camp at the end of July. But on the verge of his first and perhaps only crack at the N.F.L., he had no intention of relaxing. He reached over and ramped up the volume, his pickup trembling now as soaring chords and tribal chants swirled above the same slow, propulsive backbeat.
"O.K., don't laugh," he said. "But when I'm listening to this, I imagine myself running through a primeval forest somewhere with just a loincloth on and a huge hunting knife in my mouth. I'm really looking to kill something."
I often found myself trying to construct some kind of half-baked genealogy of Pat Schiller's athletic prowess, his possible pigskin pedigree. His paternal grandfather, Eddie Schiller, a k a the Blond Tiger, was a boxer in the late 1920s and early '30s who fought, for a time, out of Kid Howard's downtown Chicago gym. Pat's father told me he was kept from the gridiron by his mother to preserve his fingers for the keyboard. On my sister's side, there was my mother's brother, my uncle Carl Valle, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound all-city lineman at James Madison High School in Brooklyn who went on to play two seasons at Boston College. Carl's equivalently proportioned nephew, my cousin Ralph, knocked about as an offensive lineman in the semipros back in the 1960s, playing for the Brooklyn Mariners and the Long Island Bulls, the New York Giants' former farm team, briefly making the Giants' taxi squad in 1968 and 1969. And then there was my older brother Bob, a linebacker and offensive guard at Archbishop Stepinac High School, in White Plains. He went on to play at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. But the combination of an outsize will in a somewhat plodding, too-small frame led to so many concussions that he walked away before the start of his sophomore season.
Bob shaped my own football career. The summer of his sophomore year, appalled that I was still riding the bench as a wannabe fullback after my second season at Ossining High, he took matters into his own hands. Every day before dinner that summer, he put a helmet on my head, dragged me into the backyard, put me in the proper three-point guard stance and had me charge on his count into his bare, upward-flailing forearm. We did this until my face bled. We did it until I learned to get my face mask into his chest faster than his forearm could get to my face. I never sat on the bench again. By the end of two varsity seasons with only one loss, individual all-league honors and a late growth spurt that took me to 6 feet tall and 205 pounds, the college recruiters came calling. Mostly smaller schools like Bates, Colby and Colgate. Lehigh treated me to a New York Giants game. Brown had me up to Providence one weekend to meet with coaches and party all night with some players in their dorm.
Still, I knew I wasn't going any farther with football. Even on game days, I always felt that I had one foot outside the experience. During pregame psyche drills with my friend, Mike Chernick — a standout fullback and middle linebacker who went on to play at Yale — the two of us would be on the sidelines, pounding on each other's shoulder pads, growling. Occasionally I looked up and saw the wild whites of his eyes and thought, He really means this.
Pat Schiller really and wholly means it; he is all in. He flies around a football field overturning ball carriers with full-bore, joyous immersion.
"I enjoy hitting," Pat told me as we pulled into the lot of the ProForce training facility in an industrial park on Batavia's flat, barren outskirts. "Especially when you stop someone short on third or fourth down and you look up and the crowd's going nuts and you're like: 'I did that. Me. You're welcome.' That's cool. People always ask me, 'Do you change when you get on the field?' Before a game starts, I have my routine, I listen to my music and I walk out and look up at the crowd and I . . . I'm getting goose bumps right now talking about it. It's crazy. My body is filled with emotions I can't even describe. I come out of my body, and I'm like, 'I'm going to kill somebody.' I become this lunatic. And even when I start to come back down after the first few plays, I'm still a different person. You know, a savage. But when I first come out, it's like a drug, I'm literally trembling, almost crying. I have so much emotion."
For the next three hours that morning, ProForce's founder and head trainer, Chris Browning, a defensive end and linebacker who starred at Batavia High School and Western Michigan University, had my nephew and his workout partner, Pat Brown, an undrafted free agent from the University of Central Florida who played offensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings in 2011, gasping for breath in the 90-degree, midsummer heat. This was their daily, self-imposed "off-weeks" regimen, designed with Browning, to get them in the best shape possible for the start of preseason camp now only a few weeks away.
Pulling thick steamship lines, they each took turns dragging a half-ton weighted sled atop which sat a screaming Browning, back and forth across ProForce's hollowed-out industrial warehouse space. They repeatedly flipped an enormous tractor tire. They did position-specific agility drills tethered to wall-mounted resistance bands. Pat occasionally slipped out a side door to be sick and then bounded back inside to start anew.
Sitting afterward with the two Pats and Browning in his office, I realized I had before me the entire spectrum of the undrafted free-agent experience. Browning got eight phone calls from N.F.L. teams on the last Saturday morning of the 2002 draft. Four days later the Bears invited him to rookie camp, but he failed to make the team. The following season he was invited to try out with the New Orleans Saints and again failed to make the squad. He ended up playing Arena Football for the Chicago Rush, New Orleans Voodoo and Columbus Destroyers.
"Arena was very big then," he said. "Guys could get a shot at the pros. For a lineman like me, you could make $60,000 to $80,000 a year. You didn't have to mess with all the ups and downs of the N.F.L."
No one knows those up and downs better than Pat Brown. Signed by the Carolina Panthers after the close of the 2009 draft, he was released, picked up and released again five times from 2009 to 2010.
"I lived in hotels the first two seasons," he recalled. "It can be a bit of a shot to your ego. Getting told multiple times on multiple teams that you're not good enough. Some guys can handle it. Some guys can't. You just have to love it, because it's mostly out of your hands."
Brown just completed his first full season with the Vikings, and had playing time in 16 games. I asked him if he was finally feeling a sense of security.
"Never," he said. "Never. I'm always looking over my shoulder. You don't relax until you get that five-year, $25-million deal and so much money guaranteed. Then you know you're an investment."
Undrafted free agents are forever asking themselves how long they'll stick it out; how long they'll continue to work out and wait by the phone, forestalling a real job. When I asked Rico Council, he didn't hesitate: "As long as it takes, man. Football is what I know. I'm going to be in it one way or another. I'd rather it be as a player." Max Gruder told me that he would figure it out as he went, that he had a lot of other interests to pursue when he was done with football. Pat said he would probably give himself a full year of not getting anywhere and not hearing from anybody and then move on.
"I'd finish my degree in education," he said. "I still have to do a semester of student teaching. But I'll also not commit to anything serious for a while. I could end up playing in Canada. I'd do that."
All of those in the tribe of the undrafted can cite the inspiring precedents for persistence; the well-known N.F.L. Cinderella-man tales they repeat to themselves like soothing bedtime stories. Kurt Warner quarterbacked for the Iowa Barnstormers in the Arena Football League and stocked groceries before his meteoric rise. James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers was cut four times and did a stint with the Rhein Fire of N.F.L. Europe before becoming a four-time Pro Bowl linebacker and, according to a poll last year of his fellow N.F.L. players, the most feared man in football. Chase Blackburn was back home in Marysville, Ohio, at Week 12 of last season, about to take a job as a middle-school math teacher when he got the call from the New York Giants. He ended up making the key interception of a fourth-quarter Tom Brady pass that set up the Giants' game-winning drive in last year's Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots.
"I've been telling your nephew, he may bounce around three or four times before he finds a home," Browning told me. "That's tough, but, hey, he's young. Have fun. So few people get this experience. And don't get too logical about it. He could get cut because of salary considerations. Some other guy's agent might have a better relationship with the team. But then what if someone like Lofa goes down. Pat beats out the other undrafted free-agent linebackers and guess what, that boy is dressing."
Later that evening, my last night in Geneva, Pat and I stopped into a few of the local haunts along his hometown's historic main street (a location for the period film "Road to Perdition"). Wherever I went with "Mayor Schiller," as one friend called him, drinks materialized and tabs disappeared. Owners, managers, friends and friends of friends all stopped by to ask how Pat was doing and to wish him well.
"It's weird," he said to me during a rare lull. "For some reason I'm cool because I'm able to play a game. And they don't realize how hard and cutthroat it is now. They'll say things like, 'Hey, worst-case scenario, you'll be on the practice squad.' And I'm thinking, Are you kidding? That would be unbelievable. But these people are really counting on me, and I feel a lot of pressure to not let them down. That's a big part of what drives me. And I like being the interesting guy, you know? I want to be talked about and turn heads when I walk into a place. Who doesn't? It sounds so egotistic, but it's what it is. And to think this is all going to be done one day, probably sooner than later, and I'll have to face reality. Have a 9-to-5 job, not be Mr. Interesting anymore and never have the rush that I get before games. That's scary to me."
A week before Pat was scheduled to return to Flowery Branch for the five weeks of preseason camp, he received a text message from Lofa. He had torn a pectoral muscle while lifting weights. Less than a week later, the Falcons released Tatupu and signed Mike Peterson, 36, a 13-year veteran who wasn't resigned by the Falcons at the end of last season after three years at linebacker. My nephew's stock as a middle linebacker, Lofa's intended role, had suddenly soared even as his heart sank.
"People keep texting or talking to me about what a big break Lofa's injury is," Pat told me. "But they don't get it. This was the one guy I could really talk to about stuff. Plus, you just hate seeing anybody go down, especially someone that you were getting to know and feel closer to. But that's the N.F.L. Injury is the No. 1 thing on a player's mind."
Two weeks later, in early August, I was watching Pat from the sidelines at the Flowery Branch facility as Keith Armstrong, the special-teams coordinator, closed a practice with a kickoff-coverage drill. Special teams, it is constantly stressed at N.F.L. camp, are about the only place for rookies to get reps in preseason games and "make good film." One or two eye-catching plays can be enough to prompt a phone call from a team looking to fill roster holes constantly being opened by injury.
On Armstrong's signal, one waterfall of would-be tacklers after another were unleashed — the Ones, followed by the Twos: swift, downfield flows soon met at staggered, eerily soundless intervals by pad-wielding blockers. A consequence of the heightened concern about concussions in the N.F.L. is that even fully padded practices have become largely clashless choreography, like ballet without the music: that singular symphony of crashing bodies we cringingly thrill to on game days.
All through camp, Nolan stressed being offensive on defense. The simple 11-on-11 math of football inherently favors the offense. It has a "12th man" in the form of a play only its players know. What Nolan wants from his defensive unit is to find ways to "change the math." Players, especially linebackers, are expected to "shock and shed": engage their respective blockers and then throw them off on the way to the ball. To stay within their defensive scheme and yet be fast and supple enough to invent ways to be offensive and make a play.
Pat seemed to be ever balanced on that edge between his natural speed and the confines of the scheme. When the Threes' rotation came up in the kickoff-coverage drill that day, he was repeatedly the first one down the field. His swiftness, however, would soon send him flying past his scheme's scripted pas de deux with a notably tardy counterpart. Seeing that his man wasn't there, Pat just blew by and got directly to the ball carrier.
"Schiller?" Armstrong fumed in his deep, drill-sergeantese. "Schiller, you're killing me!"
The only time I could get with Pat now was quick snatches of conversation along the sidelines after practice. Preseason camp days started at dawn and didn't wind up until 10 p.m.: days of meetings, meals, practices, more meetings and then bed, all confined to the Flowery Branch facility. But as a sweat-drenched No. 45 headed toward the team locker room after kickoff-coverage drills that day, he gave me a knowing wink and smile as he passed.
Two days later, just hours before the Falcons' first preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens, Pat exuded the same sense of inner assuredness, one that he, too, seemed surprised by. "It's crazy," he told me in the lobby of the team's downtown Atlanta hotel. "We play tonight, but I'm not worried. I feel calm. The key thing the coaches are looking for is how fast we play with the right technique. If they see that your footwork is wrong or that you're at all hesitant, that sends up red flags. That's trouble. When you do things fast, it means you're confident."
From the Georgia Dome press box that night, I watched the Blond Tiger II pace the sidelines, still looking for some way out of his mind's playbook cage. It wasn't until midway into the third quarter that he took the field. Not on special teams, but as the Atlanta Falcons' middle linebacker. On his first play in an N.F.L. game, a run off-tackle, he flew through the offense and brought the runner down at the line of scrimmage: speed and scheme melding at last.
He tallied four tackles for the night. In the postgame locker room, he and his fellow undrafted linebackers, Max Gruder, Rico Council and Jerrell Harris, were all wide-eyed from the adrenaline rush of finally having their first taste of N.F.L. action. As he dressed, Pat handed me his cellphone to read the pregame text he received from Lofa: "Tear it up tonight!"
The last three weeks of preseason whirled by in a maddening vortex of Sphinx-like silence from the coaching staff about the makeup of the final roster and increasingly rampant speculation by everyone else. My younger brother, Joe, was sending me so many e-mails with the latest blog predictions that I finally had to repeat to him Pat's admonition to me way back in minicamp, when I kept citing blog posts picking him as the most likely to make team.
"Ignore that stuff," he said. "It's not really based on anything."
By the night of the Falcons' final preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Aug. 30, the original 90-man roster had been cut to 75. Gruder was the only linebacker released. The final cuts down to the 53-man roster would be made by noon the next day.
The math of making an N.F.L. roster seems straight forward. There are 40 or so players who are Ones and Twos on offense and defense. Then there is a punter, at least one kicker, a long snapper and often a third-string quarterback. This leaves just a handful of positions available. The Falcons' starting linebackers were set: Akeem Dent would be the starting middle linebacker with Mike Peterson as his backup. Sean Weatherspoon and Stephen Nicholas would play on either side. For the other two backup linebacker spots (if the Falcons decided to go with six), Spencer Adkins, a three-year veteran from the University of Miami, and Robert James, an undrafted free agent from Arizona State who spent the last two seasons on the practice squad, seemed favorites. It would be up to the three remaining undrafted free-agent linebackers to find some way to change that math.
I watched that final preseason game on TV. Pat didn't get a single rep on special teams, but he played the better part of the second half at middle linebacker in an inspired trance, calling checks, conducting the defense and taking down ball carriers like a seasoned pro. On one sweep, he shocked and shed two blockers, did a full 360-degree turn and somehow found the running back again, taking him down for a loss.
He ended up tying Akeem Dent for the team lead in tackles with eight. In the postgame locker room, thoroughly drained by the Florida heat, he had to hydrate intravenously.
"I was dead," he told me later. "Played something like 60 reps. My sweat was sweating. I went into that game thinking, This is the last time you're ever going to put on a helmet. I did everything like I did in college. Wore my face paint. Got into a zone. Didn't give a damn what anybody thought or said. I was out there just flying around. I was a savage. Whether I got cut or not was out of my hands, but I never felt more at peace. I had no regrets."
Coach Pires made a point of stopping by Pat's locker. "He said: 'You played your tail off tonight. No matter what happens tomorrow, you've got to be proud,' " Pat told me.
At just past 9:30 the following morning, Pat was back at the Flowery Branch facility getting a long-craved training-room massage when he got a phone call. It was from the Falcons' football-operations office. They wanted to see him in the team-meeting room.
"I knew right then," Pat told me. "I'm thinking, You have got to be kidding."
Followers of HBO's N.F.L. training-camp series "Hard Knocks" know this moment well: the solemn handing over of the team playbook, the heart-to-heart send-off by the coach. The Falcons, however, have players turn in their playbooks at the end of each week. Pat entered the meeting room empty-handed to see 16 other teammates with the same empty expressions. Among them were the other undrafted free-agent linebackers, Rico Council and Jerrell Harris, and also Spencer Adkins. The team was going with only five linebackers. Robert James got the fifth spot.
They all sat there together, quietly talking about how lousy it felt, as one by one each player was escorted up to Smith's office. Pat was among the last three guys to be called. After waiting well over an hour, he now found himself sitting before Smith and the general manager, Thomas Dimitroff.
"They shook my hand," Pat said. "Coach Smith did all the talking. I can't remember his exact words. I was half-listening. I was so bummed. I'm getting cut. The thrust of it was that of all the players in camp, I was one of the guys who'd improved the most from week to week. He said: 'You played your heart out last night. We really feel you're going to be playing in this league somewhere. Unfortunately, we're releasing you. We just don't have a spot available for you now, but if anything changes, we'll call you.' I thanked them for the opportunity, and that was about it."
Downstairs, he noticed a group of five players sitting off to one side.
"I went over and asked them what's up," Pat told me. "They said they were being kept around for the practice squad. That's when it all really hit me that I was finished."
At 11:56 that morning I received an e-mail from Pat's father.
"C, Patrick was released. He's not in the mood to talk to anyone at this time. FYI Pat."
On the hour drive south that afternoon from Flowery Branch to Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, my typically text-happy nephew numbly watched as one message after the next came in. The veteran linebackers Stephen Nicholas and Sean Weatherspoon both texted to say how great he played against the Jaguars and that he shouldn't be surprised if he got picked up by someone right away. Pires, the linebacker coach, phoned as well. None of it was helping.
Back home that night, his parents wanted to take him to dinner. They purposefully chose a place in Elgin, a couple of towns over. "Mayor Schiller" couldn't bear the thought of coming face to face with any of his eager hometown followers. His reputation, however, clearly extended beyond one suburb's borders.
"We're just sitting down," Pat told me, "and sure enough this waiter comes over. 'Hey you're Pat Schiller. You play for the Falcons, right?' And I'm like: 'Well, not anymore, dude. Just got cut.' "
In his old bed that night, beneath the framed photo of the Blond Tiger that he keeps above a pair of bronzed boxing gloves, Pat felt deeply conflicted about being back home. He said he hated himself for liking it so much, right down to the warm heft of his dog Champ and the chance to just hang low for a while and heal.
He slept well into the following morning, got up around 11 a.m. and shortly after noon headed out the front door with his father to shop for a new laptop. By then, Pat told me, he was beginning to take some stock in what Smith, his teammates and his agent all told him: he had made good film.
"But dude," Pat told me, "I've got to admit, I was thinking, If someone is going to call, I hope it's two or three weeks from now. I was really looking forward to some time off."
Pat and his dad had just climbed into the cab of his pickup when his phone rang. It was the Falcons. They wanted to know if Pat would consider coming back to be on their practice squad.
"Consider?" Pat told me. "I mean a couple of weeks off would have been nice. But to play for the team whose guys and system I know?"
He was back in Flowery Branch by 9 that night, having never unpacked his bag.
Six weeks later, I flew down to Atlanta to watch the Falcons' away-game matchup, against the Washington Redskins, on TV with Pat. There's a certain ghostly quality to being on an N.F.L. practice squad. You work all week with the team, attend all the same meetings, eat the same meals, accrue all the same weekly bumps, aches and bruises and yet walk the sidelines in the team's official civilian clothes for home matchups and don't travel for away games. An injury to one of the Falcons' five active-roster linebackers could have Pat dressing for the next game. He could also be dropped at a moment's notice for a needed backup at another position. Or he could be picked up by any of the league's other teams for their active roster, forcing Pat to pack his things and break the lease he signed on the two-bedroom town house in Atlanta's northern suburbs.
The farthest Pat had previously lived from home was the place that he and Chandler Harnish shared near the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, just 25 miles from Geneva. His parents took care of most of his bills, including car and gas and his auto and health insurance. His mother did his laundry at home. He never balanced a checkbook. Now, before a small whiteboard in his narrow kitchen, the two of us stood reviewing the monthly cost of living his dream.
Rent: $975
Furniture rental: $400
Gas/power: $55
Car: $310
Fitness: $30
Cable: $40
He knew he could save more of his weekly $3,500 paycheck (after taxes) if he bought furniture. But to stay as mobile as possible in case of a sudden call to another team, he chose to rent: the headboard and clothes dresser in the bedroom; a spare wood table with four metal chairs in the dining room; and the L-shaped leather living-room sofa with a coffee table/ottoman. All the pieces seemed to barely touch the carpeting, as if they, too, were somehow keenly aware of just how provisional the life is that they're furnishing. The air mattress in his guest bedroom was a last-minute donation from his former practice-squad mate Bryce Harris. Harris was signed by the New Orleans Saints to fill a hole in their roster during the first week of the season, just days after he moved into a condo a few doors down from my nephew's.
"It's not easy," Pat said, "having to pick up everything just like that, break your lease, go to a new town and learn a whole new system. But, hey, for $390,000 a year, you break your lease."
He told me he feels much more relaxed now with his teammates, more like one of the guys, but is still very aware of where he stands in the N.F.L.'s strict hierarchy.
"You have to know your place," he told me. "And believe me, I know. I'm always the first guy at meetings, and I'm the first guy back in the room after breaks. I still get the vets water and Gatorade. I dropped over $100 at Costco the other day on bulk candy, fruit roll-ups, Starbursts, beef jerky, sunflower seeds. We're in there watching film for hours, so that's my contribution."
He occasionally goes out with some of the other guys on the practice squad, but not much with the veteran linebackers.
"I talk more now about the game with them," he said, "and they're all cool guys, but I don't want to say, 'Hey, you want to hang out?' You don't want to be that guy. Everybody does their own thing. They're living their lives. But it's not like I sit at home and say: 'Oh, this is so sad. I don't have any friends.' It gets lonely at times. But I just kind of chill, and I find things to do."
That afternoon, Pat and I sat in front of his new flat-screen TV — the only thing in his place other than a coffee maker that he bought — watching his teammates' come-from-behind victory over the Redskins, the Falcons fifth win against no losses. Pat watched like any modern-day, tech-savvy youth: a MacBook Air propped on his belly, an iPhone beside him, deftly surfing the Internet, fielding and sending texts between plays and during commercials, eyes darting between multiple screens until a play propelled him off the sofa with a thunderous roar.
"That's it!" he yelled at the tight end Tony Gonzalez. "Give me more of that Y.A.C." (yards after contact).
Somehow it wasn't until we were watching postgame highlights that either of us noticed the backup linebacker, Robert James, whose former place on the practice squad Pat now held, had come into the game sometime during the fourth quarter. Pat sat bolt upright, grabbed the remote and scrolled back through the game to determine the precise moment James entered. He then went to the Falcons' game thread on his computer, eyes narrowing, lips slightly parted in anticipation.
"Stephen Nicholas," he muttered. "Ankle."
For the next two days of my visit, we were on the Stephen Nicholas ankle watch. Texts and calls came from all directions. Everyone Pat knew, it seemed, was aware of Nicholas's ankle. Gruder, with whom Pat had only exchanged a couple of text messages since Gruder was released in August, wrote, "You getting called up this week?" Chris Browning of ProForce phoned to ask the same thing. Over dinner the following night, the number of Dave Lee, Pat's agent, flashed up on Pat's cellphone. Pat held the phone to his ear. A protracted silence.
"No, dude," he finally interrupted. "That's a funny story. I just thought you were calling about something else."
He hung up. A moment later he looked down with a quizzical head tilt at another call coming in.
"Crazy," he said. "You see a number pop up you don't know, and you think: This is it. A team calling to pick me up."
Nicholas's ankle injury turned out to be less serious than originally thought. But in the Falcons' seventh game of the season, the linebacker Sean Weatherspoon was carted off the field with his own ankle troubles. He was out of the lineup for the next two games. When I checked with Pat a few days before the Falcons' game against the Arizona Cardinals, Weatherspoon's status was being listed as questionable, and the Weatherspoon ankle watch was still on.
"Who knows?" Pat told me. "But if the call comes, I'm ready."
My last night with him in Atlanta, we went back to his town house after dinner to watch a little Monday-night Football. During a break in the action, he led me into his clothes-and-sneaker-strewn bedroom to show me the huge walk-in closet he felt would allow him to send back his rented dresser. I noticed that the dresser was topped with all manner of balms, unguents and painkilling medications: a 23-year-old with the medicine cabinet of a septuagenarian.
Somehow, it was only then that I felt the full weight of what my nephew had managed to pull off: the ridiculous odds he overcame; all the excellent players he beat out. I suddenly felt more like one of his hometown acolytes than an uncle to a kid who grew up a thousand miles and, in terms of life experiences and career pursuits, a world away from me. A kid I only came to know at this juncture because he is so good at a game that I, like millions of others, so love to watch.
"Dude," he said, as I stood staring at his dresser. "I swear to God, if someone tells me right now there's some miracle body cream out there that would make me feel 100 percent and prevent me from getting hurt but that could also cause cancer or liver damage down the line, I'd use it in a heartbeat. I would."
He picked up an empty bottle of anti-inflammatory pills and tossed it in the trash.
"Even if I make it," he said, "the average career is what, three or four years tops. But if I get hurt now, I'm gone. It's nothing personal. If I'm injured, I'm dead weight. I'm stealing their money. Do you know how many linebackers there are sitting home right now that want my job? Hundreds. I mean, let's get real. As much as Coach Smith or Coach Pires might like me, it would be: 'Hey, it's been a fun ride. You're a good kid. But see ya, Schiller!' "


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Corsair TX750 750W: Corsair, a company known for its high-performance system memory since rising to enthusiast stardom in the late 90's, has been toying around with the power supply market since last year when introducing the Corsair HX series. After the successful introduction of the HX520 and HX620, Corsair went on to introduce the VX series with the VX450W and VX550W. In Corsair's latest move, they have now christened the TX power supply series with the TX650 and TX750. In this review we have the Corsair TX750 power supply for testing, which complies with the ATX12V 2.2 standard, sports Active PFC, and offers a single high-performance +12V rail.
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Scratching the stained-glass ceiling, an increasing number of women hold leadership positions in the church. Here's a look at the gifts they bring and the challenges they face.
It is lunchtime on a Thursday, and Sharon Daly, vice president for social policy at Catholic Charities USA, talks hurriedly on her cell phone, the buzzing chaos of Washington's Union Station in the background. Daly, the first woman to occupy this position, squeezes a phone interview in between legislative meetings on Capitol Hill, with the future funding of programs like Section 8 housing and Head Start at the forefront of her mind.
A 25-year veteran in the field of legislative advocacy, Daly recalls feeling a little out of place at the 1984 bishops' meeting, the first she attended during her tenure in the public policy arm of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). "There were hardly any women there. I just remember looking out into this sea of 300 white heads and gold chains," she says with a laugh. Despite her minority experience, Daly has never looked back. After holding a variety of legislative advocacy positions, she has devoted the past nine years to Catholic Charities' advocacy work on welfare reform, tax issues, and the federal budget.
Daly is but one in an expanding group of courageous, intelligent women leaders in the U.S. Catholic Church, women who have been named to top-level executive church jobs in the traditionally male-clergy-dominated areas of personnel, property, and policy.
These highly-educated women, most of whom have served the church loyally for decades, are the first women to hold positions such as chancellors, personnel directors, and pastoral administrators. Though they embrace a collaborative leadership style that resists self-promotion, these women are not the type to shy away from "firsts."
Mary Edlund, 55, the first female chancellor of the Archdiocese of Dallas, began her post with the daunting task of regaining the laity's trust after a major clergy sex-abuse crisis in 1997. Carol Fowler, 61, the first female director of personnel in the Archdiocese of Chicago, proudly recalls when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin asked her to take the position in 1991.
Valerie Chapman, 53, pastoral administrator at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Portland, Oregon, stood in the designated pastor's space in Portland's cathedral as the archbishop confirmed her parish's high school students. Dolores Leckey, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., now welcomes young women theology students into her office for informal mentoring sessions, drawing upon her rich 20 years of work experience as founding director of the Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women, and Youth at the USCCB.
Though most U.S. Catholics would not be surprised to learn that women comprise 83 percent of those engaged in parish work, many are not acquainted with the increasing number of women who hold high-level administrative church positions in dioceses, social service agencies, and faith-based organizations. These pioneering women carry with them an enormous amount of decision-making power by virtue of the positions they hold.
Daly, Edlund, Fowler, Chapman, Leckey, and many women like them are changing the face of the church's leadership. Their stories tell not only of the rich gifts and unique leadership styles that women bring to the church, but also of the challenges that come with being a "first" in anything.
A spirit of collaboration
Many women bring a collaborative leadership style into organizational structures that have traditionally operated hierarchically. "I used to teach math," says Fowler. "I treat issues like a word problem and try to be a problem-solver by working with others. Sometimes this means that I'll decide more slowly. If I have a disagreement to deal with, for example, between [religious educators] and principals, I'll pull together a committee to look at the problem."
Sister of Mercy Sharon Euart, 58, a canon lawyer in Silver Springs, Maryland, agrees that for many women leaders the decision-making process is as significant as the decision itself. "Women tend to be more attentive to things like process and dialogue. This can extend the decision-making process but can generate ownership, understanding, and support."
But Daly doesn't see this style as unique to women. "Before I saw a lot of leaders I assumed that collaboration was unique to women. Now that I have worked with lots of leaders I'm not convinced that's the case. Collaboration does not come any more naturally to me than to my male counterparts," she says. But collaboration is essential for influencing legislation. "It's a complex dance," she says. "You have to have relationships with both allies and opponents. The best leaders in this line of work are people who are collaborative. It doesn't matter if they are male or female."
Leckey found a collaborative leadership style helped in her work with the USCCB because "I wasn't competitive with the bishops like some men were. Many of them had gone to seminary together and suddenly one of their classmates was named a bishop, and one of them would be thinking, 'Well, I was smarter in liturgy than he was.' That wasn't an issue for me."
Relationship-building can be a challenge for women church leaders, especially when working with clergy who have access to informal social networks that often exclude women.
During her tenure as the first female associate general secretary at the USCCB, Euart says, "There were times I'd feel left out of the conversation because there had been previous conversations that had taken place at the priests' residence before work," she says. "I had to let [the priests] know that while it may have happened unconsciously, it was not helpful to the decision-making process. I learned to adapt to this and looked for more information when it was appropriate."
Answering the call
The majority of women who now serve in these high-level administrative positions speak out of many years of experience working in the church. Most believe that, in their case, familiarity has its privileges.
This was certainly the case for Edlund, who, in the wake of a major clergy sex-abuse trial, was given the responsibility of reviewing sexual-abuse allegations involving minors, reconstituting advisory review boards, and heading up the priest personnel board, which had historically been composed of all clergy. Edlund, who'd worked for the Dallas archdiocese since 1979, says she definitely "had an advantage in that I already had a good working relationship with the clergy. They were getting a known entity."
Euart agrees. Being the first female associate general secretary of the USCCB was a challenge, but "I felt that I moved into it smoothly because I was not completely unknown. I felt tremendous staff support and support from the bishops. This was important because one of my responsibilities was to supervise 10 departments, most of which were headed by priests."
Euart, who has been in church administration for more than 25 years, thoroughly enjoyed her time at the USCCB and was sometimes "in awe of the responsibility I had. I realized that the final 'yes' or 'no' that a pastor or bishop or superior may give was determined not only by that person's prudent judgment but by the influence of my perspective on a decision-making process."
Unfortunately for Euart, being a known entity wasn't quite enough. In the fall of 2000, after 13 years as the USCCB's associate general secretary, Euart was asked to leave her post. This was especially painful for her in light of the fact that she was, in the minds of many clergy and laypeople, the leading candidate for the general secretary post itself. When the U.S. bishops asked the Vatican if religious or other laypeople could be nominated for the job, according to a September 2000 article in the National Catholic Reporter, the answer from Rome was a resounding "no."
The general secretary serves as the day-to-day chief operating officer of the bishops' conference. Though only priests have held the post since the position's inception in 1918, canon law does not specify that this high-level administrative position must be held by a priest.
Not only did Euart not get the top job, she lost her job as associate general secretary. "The new general secretary wanted to hire his own staff," she says. "It was the most painful professional experience I have ever had, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. This experience is something a lot of women fear. I would have liked it to have been different."
To say she was fired because she was a woman "would be too much speculation" Euart says (another woman religious was subsequently hired for Euart's position). She does, however, name shaky job security as one of the primary liabilities for women in church leadership positions.
Jane Bensman, 54, a pastoral associate at Queen of Martyrs Parish in Dayton, Ohio, and the only full-time pastoral staff member at the 500-family parish, experienced her own job security scare when her pastor was removed in April 2002 in the face of a substantiated allegation of sexual abuse. An interim pastor was appointed who was "very difficult," according to Bensman.
"It was pretty much a mess, and he handled things very inadequately," she says. "He didn't want [the staff] to be in charge, even though we really had been the ones who had been in charge all along. We definitely didn't fit into his mold of how he thought things should be."
Thankfully, the interim pastor only stayed for three months, and Queen of Martyrs now shares a new pastor with a neighboring parish. Bensman says the new pastor is "someone who works with me like I am an equal, a colleague."
Despite the loss and difficulties that accompanied Bensman and Euart's experiences, both stand firm in their convictions they are called to serve the church. "My heart's desire is finding a way to serve the bishops in this country again," says Euart, who now serves various dioceses and religious communities as a consultant.
"It was ultimately because of the people that I stayed at the parish," says Bensman. "I felt that I could provide stability in the transition. I spent a lot of time praying about my decision, and it turned out to be wonderful."
Euart and Bensman's deep sense of call to ministry is echoed emphatically by many women administrators. Such anecdotal evidence is bolstered by a March 2002 study by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the first academic study of women's experience in Catholic Church administrative roles. The LCWR study, titled "Women and Jurisdiction: An Unfolding Reality," found that 85 percent of the 426 women interviewed reported a high sense of vocation or calling.
Does this mean that these women feel a call to the priesthood? Are these administrative positions simply the next best thing?
"Ordination has never been an interest of mine personally, but that is not to say that I am not aware of other women who are interested in it," says Euart. "My gifts are in administration."
Fowler echoes a similar sentiment. "I don't believe that God calls you to something that isn't going to happen," she says. "But the sense of vocation is very strong in me. My call is the absolute number one, overarching reason why I do this. It comes out of Baptism."
Though these leading female church administrators enjoy unprecedented access to decision-making power, the introduction to the LCWR study sounds a note of caution and reality with respect to decision-making and ordination: "As long as jurisdiction (the power to govern) is tied to ordination, a very limited number of roles with authority will be open to women."
Though the number of high-level women administrators is increasing, they are still the exception rather than the norm. In the end, it is by-and-large the ordained clergy who have the final say in major administrative decisions.
The next generation
The average age of women church administrators–59.5 years according to the LCWR study–raises the question of who will carry the torch for the next generation.
For those gathered at a March 2001 first-ever national gathering of women diocesan leaders, recruitment of younger women occupied a prominent place on the agenda.
Sheila Garcia, assistant director of the USCCB's Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women, and Youth says that she is "terribly concerned that there are not enough younger women in the pipeline. We need to point out to them the number of leadership positions that are available . . . . Many younger women think that because they can't be ordained there is no way they can have a meaningful role."
Fowler experiences this dearth of women firsthand, especially when she serves as the only woman on an 18-member advisory council to Chicago Cardinal Francis George. While other women attend the meetings, Fowler is the only voting female member of the council. "We need more women at the higher level positions for their perspective on life, church, and who God is in our lives."
Other women administrators speak emphatically of the continued need for a women's viewpoint in the church, and the challenges they face in making that perspective heard. "[It] will not happen unless women get in there and work at it," says Chapman. "It's not like going through the seminary, where when [seminarians] finish they will be guaranteed a job."
Chapman emphasizes the need for older women to mentor younger women "and not to feel threatened by them. With so few leadership opportunities for women available there is a tendency to be protective of the few opportunities that do exist."
The women also emphasize the importance of putting younger women on a career track by making education available. Results of the LCWR study found that 75 percent of women administrators have a master's degree; an additional 10 percent have doctoral degrees. Along with education, a high premium is placed on previous work experience. Ninety-four percent of the LCWR respondents said that they had been prepared for their administrative position by a previous church position.
Younger women like Kristi Schulenberg, 31, and Stacey Noem, 27, who currently work in church ministry, have committed themselves to serving the church, but salary tops their list of concerns as they cast an eye to the future. The average salary for women administrators, according to the LCWR study, was $20,000-29,000.
"As a young adult woman, I find it very interesting that many of my friends and I were formed by institutions of Catholic higher education and are doing the work we do because of our experiences there," says Schulenberg, director of parish social ministry for Catholic Charities USA. "But when you come out of a Catholic university and have to pay off exorbitant loans, how do you do that when you are making 20 grand working for a diocese?"
Stacey Noem, former director of the Family Life Office in the Diocese of Venice, Florida and current master of divinity student at Notre Dame, echoes similar concerns. "I'm worried that I won't be able to find a job that will allow me to send my kids to Catholic school. Am I going to be able to provide for my family? I want to love my job, but I love my family, too."
Competitive salaries, mentoring, and opportunities for graduate education and leadership will help ensure that educated, trained younger women will be ready and willing to lead the church in the future.
Mentoring is a high priority for Catholic Charities' Sharon Daly, who tries "to challenge the people who work for me to grow. I'm just as likely to send someone else from our staff to a meeting on Capitol Hill as I am to go myself."
Euart says that, despite the professional challenges she has endured, she highly recommends the field of church leadership to women. "If younger women have the gifts, the desire, and the training, and have a love for the church, it is worth a try. Women have to try to find a niche in the structure that currently exists–we can't lose sight of the fact that this is a hierarchical church, and that isn't going to change."
Jane Bensman looks to the future of the church with hope. "The future potential for women will only increase," she says, "and the field of church ministry will continue to be strengthened because of it."
This article appeared in the September 2003 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 68, No. 9, page 32).


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Orthodontists Earn More Than CEOs: 10 Facts About Wages
The average U.S. orthodontist earns $196,270. The average CEO makes $178,400.
Those numbers, released Tuesday by the Labor Department, might come as a shock in some boardrooms. But they probably don't catch parents of crooked-teeth teenagers off guard. Both positions counted among the nation's ten best-paying occupations last year, according to a ranking of 821 jobs tracked by the government.


text:
Tyrone Rodriguez
1001 Spikes is a "cruel" and challenging platformer from Nicalis hitting Vita this year
Nicalis has announced 1001 Spikes and its coming to Vita this year. The team used Spelunker and Challenger as inspirations, but don't let the retro 8-bit art style fool you: this will be an "incredibly difficult platformer with very precise controls requiring pixel-perfect inputs," according to the developer.
Tyrone Rodriguez headlines
Fez headed to "pretty much" every platform, except 3DS
Fez creator and lone Polytron survivor Phil Fish has said he wants Fez to release on almost everything, notably entering negotiations with Sony but ruling out the 3DS.
Cave Story+ coming to 3DS eShop in the next month
Nicalis' Tyrone Rodriguez has said Cave Story+ will be heading to 3DS eShop within the next month or so. Rodriguez told Destructoid would be separate from Cave Story 3D and not an update, meaning past purchasers of 3D will have to purchase +. He further teased upcoming updates for the Steam version, noting: "How do […]
Quick Quotes: Nicalis on 2D sprites in Cave Story 3D
"When we started on the project back in December, I really wanted to find a way to make 2D characters also work in 3D space. Being a Cave Story fan myself, I thought other fans would probably appreciate it too. Anyway, we've spent a lot of time testing and making sure it works right, but […]
God of War III is "fluff," says Cave Story developer
God of War III is epic. No doubt about that. But it's "fluff" too, according to the developer of WiiWare title Cave Story.
Tyrone Rodriguez latest


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|*April 15 - 21
of the
Holy Spirit
Read for This Week's Study:
|Exod. 31:3; Num. 11:25; Isa. 6:1-7; 48:10; Ezek. 36:25-27; Mal. 3:2, 3; Matt. 3:11; Rom. 8:9; 2 Cor. 3:3; 5:17; 7:1.
Memory Text:
| "I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter,
that he may abide with you for ever"
Many Old Testament writers promised an outpouring of the Spirit (Joel 2:28, 29). John the Baptistthe forerunner of Jesusinformed the crowds that the One who would come after him, the Messiah, would baptize the repentant with the Holy Spirit and fire. However, the disciples of Jesus did not see the need of the Spirit during Jesus' ministry. Jesus was close to them. Why should they need another?
Of course, Jesus wasn't going to be around forever, at least in the flesh. The plan of salvation called for Him to leave, to minister the merits of His atonement in the sanctuary above before coming back and claiming those bought with His blood.
Thus, He promised to send them His Spirit. The Spirit would be their Guide and Comforter as they would not be able to follow their beloved Master where He was soon to go.
The coming Comforter was to be the disciples' constant Companion. He would sustain and comfort them in their loss and more than compensate for their Friend's departure. Yet, as we will see this week, the promise of the Spirit was not only for them but for us, as well.
*Study this week's lesson to prepare for Sabbath, April 22.
|April 16
The Promise of Water
"Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them" (Ezek. 36:25-27).
Look at the promises in the above text. What is God saying He will do for His people? Though these were written to those in another time, why are the principles behind these promises applicable for us today, as well? See also Rom. 8:9; 2 Cor. 3:3; 5:17; 7:1; Gal. 5:16, 25; Eph. 5:26; 1 Thess. 4:3.
Ezekiel speaks of the Spirit under the symbol of water. By using the emblem of water, the prophet presents the Spirit both as a cleansing and life-giving Agent. Followers of Christ will have new lives, one in which through the power of the Holy Spirit they are cleansed of filthiness of the flesh and live a life of faith and obedience.
Thus, it's clear from these texts that whatever the work of the Spirit, it includes the process of sanctification. It includes a change of habits, of actions, of words. Most important, it also includes a change of heart.
Read 2 Corinthians 3:3. How does this text help explain what the Holy Spirit will do in our lives?
|Focusing on the above text, ask yourself this question: As an "epistle of Christ," what's my message to all who read me?
|April 17
John the Baptist's Promise
"I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire" (Matt. 3:11).
"John proclaimed the coming of the Messiah, and called the people to repentance. As a symbol of cleansing from sin, he baptized them in the waters of the Jordan. Thus by a significant object lesson he declared that those who claimed to be the chosen people of God were defiled by sin, and that without purification of heart and life they could have no part in the Messiah's kingdom."Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 104.
But John was keenly aware that his baptism would not suffice to fit men and women to stand in the presence of God. More was needed than a baptism with water. There was also the baptism of fire.
It's very interesting how both water and fire are used as symbols of the work of the Holy Spirit. It's hard to think of two things that, in one sense, are more opposite from each other than fire and water. And yet, both are used to describe the actions of the Holy Spirit.
How do these texts help us understand the fire image in regard to the Holy Spirit? Isa. 6:1-7; 48:10; Mal. 3:2, 3; Luke 12:49; Heb. 12:29.
Fire and water are two great natural purifying agencies, and it is appropriate that both should be used to represent the regeneration of the heart, the work of the Holy Spirit. And yet, fire acts very differently upon us than does water. They both might, in a spiritual sense, accomplish the same thing, but the processes by which they work are different. When we think of water, we often think of something soothing, refreshing, delightful; in contrast, though fire brings with it warmth, it also implies trial (1 Pet. 4:12), as well as pain and suffering. The image of a refiner's fire is one that doesn't express a process that would be comfortable or pleasant. And that's, no doubt, because sometimes the work that needs to be done in us is like a refiner's fire: We have to be purged of sin; the dross has to be burned away.
|What have been some trials "by fire" that brought about important changes in your life? What did you learn from these experiences that could be of benefit to others?
|April 18
The Spirit Not Yet Given
"On the last and most important day of the festival Jesus stood up and said in a loud voice, 'Whoever is thirsty should come to me and drink. As the scripture says, "Whoever believes in me, streams of life-giving water will pour out from his heart." '" Jesus said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were going to receive. At that time the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not been raised to glory" (John 7:37-39, TEV).
When Jesus spoke these words, the Spirit as a dove had already descended upon Him. An abundance of Old Testament references indicate that the Holy Spirit had long been at work in behalf of humanity. What then does John mean when he says "The Spirit had not yet been given"?
Even though the Spirit had worked with men and women from the entrance of sin, He had not come to earth in His fullness. That was not to take place until Jesus had been glorified (see next week's study).
As Jesus was about to leave them, what promise did He give His disciples with reference to His presence? Matt. 28:20; Acts 1:4, 5.
How does John 16:7 help us understand Christ's promises to remain with us even unto the end of the world?
Christ's departure would enrich the disciples and all believers rather than impoverish them. While on earth, Jesus was geographically limited to one particular place at a time. While He was with the three disciples on the mountain, He could not be with the others at the foot of the mountain. He was limited in space, as we are. But the Holy Spirit was not to be cumbered with humanity or limited in space. Being omnipresent, the Spirit is not confined by the limitation of a human body. He is equally accessible to all everywhere. And it's through the presence of the Holy Spirit that Jesus remains with us, even to the end of the world.
|Go back and read the text written out at the top of today's lesson. Is there anyone you know from whom "streams of life-giving water" have poured out upon you? What was the person like? How could you be more like him or her in those positive areas?
|April 19
Jesus" Promise
before His crucifixion, what did Jesus again promise
His disciples? What hope exists for us today in that promise
This is the first direct promise made by Jesus to His disciples about the coming of the Holy Spirit. Evidently, He is referring to the Day of Pentecost. Yet, this was not the Spirit's first appearance on the earth.
"Before this the Spirit had been in the world; from the very beginning of the work of redemption He had been moving upon men's hearts. But while Christ was on earth, the disciples had desired no other helper. Not until they were deprived of His presence would they feel their need of the Spirit, and then He would come."Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 669.
do these texts tell us about the influence of the Holy
Spirit on human beings prior to the coming of Christ?
Sam. 10:6;
51:10, 11;
John 20:22 shows that before He left His disciples, Christ "breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Again He said "Behold, I send the promise of My Father upon you" (Luke 24:49). But not until after the Ascension was the gift received in its fullness. Not until through faith and prayer the disciples had surrendered themselves fully for His working was the outpouring of the Spirit received. Then, in a special sense, the goods of heaven were committed to the followers of Christ. In other words, though Christ gave them this wonderful promise, they had to be prepared to receive it. Is it any different today for us?
|We're often told to pray for the Holy Spirit, but what must you do in order to be prepared to receive it?
|April 20
Another Comforter
"I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you" (John 14:18).
"Another Comforter" (John 14:16) was coming to take the place of Jesus. Up to this time Jesus had been with the disciples and had been their Helper in every emergency. But now another Person was coming to take His place.
The Greek word translated "Comforter" is a compound word made up of para, which means "alongside," and kletos, which means "one called." Thus parakletos means "one called to stand alongside another," or one called to take his or her part to help another in any emergency that arises. It has the meaning of "advocate" or "counselor."
Further, the same verb form is translated "exhort." Thus, He is also an "Exhorter." In fact, this latter meaning is the prominent feature of the work of the Spirit as outlined by John. He will "teach" and "bring all things to your . . . remembrance" (John 14:26). He will testify of Christ (John 15:26). He will "reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment" (John 16:8). He will guide into all truth and show things to come (vs. 13). He will glorify Christ and receive from Him and impart to the disciples (vs. 14).
Yet, the Word also conveys the thought of a helper always at hand with counsel, strength, exhortation, or whatever help is needed. Though Jesus all but equates Himself with the presence of the Spirit, it's clear the Holy Spirit will do for them what Christ Himself would do.
do these texts
John 3:24,
help us understand the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives
The apostles and their fellow believers were not to be left alone or without help after Jesus ascended to heaven. An all-adequate Helper was to be with them. "By the Spirit, He said, He would manifest Himself to them."Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 670.
Why is the resurrection of Jesus so important to us as Seventh-day Adventists, especially with our understanding of the state of the dead?
|April 21
Further Study:
|Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles,
pp. 36, 40, 41, 52-54; The
Desire of Ages, pp. 100-103,
668-672; Gospel Workers,
pp. 284-289.
"The Holy Spirit is Christ's representative, but divested of the personality of humanity, and independent thereof. Cumbered with humanity, Christ could not be in every place personally. Therefore it was for their interest that He should go to the Father, and send the Spirit to be His successor on earth. No one could then have any advantage because of his location or his personal contact with Christ. By the Spirit the Saviour would be accessible to all. In this sense He would be nearer to them than if He had not ascended on high."Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 669.
"If we look to Jesus and trust in Him we call to our aid a power that has conquered the foe on the field of battle, and with every temptation He will make a way of escape. When Satan comes in like a flood, we must meet his temptations with the sword of the Spirit, and Jesus will be our helper and will lift up for us a standard against him."Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 5, p. 426.
Discussion Questions:
| As a class, discuss your answers to Thursday's final
Do you know anyone going through a fiery trial right now? Why not, as a class, get in touch with that person and let him or her know your concern and ask whether there is anything the class, as a group, could do to help?
In what ways can, we do some of the same work as the Holy Spirit? That is, how can we comfort, exhort, or teach others? Are we not, by doing these things, showing the reality of the Spirit in our lives? What other ways can we manifest the presence of the Holy Spirit? How does the work of the Holy Spirit in us harmonize with all the Bible commands for loving others and ministering to their needs?
|I N S I D E Story
|Sacrifice of Love
Ramesh Rathod
Mukam and his wife, Gimil, are rice farmers in India. They faithfully attended their village church until religious trouble broke out in 1995 and several churches were destroyed. Fearing more violence, the people closed the church. In 2000 Mukam and Gimil learned that a group of Adventists planned to hold evangelistic and health meetings in their village. The villagers provided housing for the team members. Mukam and Gimil hosted several team members in their small home.
Excited to hear gospel preaching again, Mukam and Gimil invited everyone to attend the meetings. Between 300 and 400 people gathered to hear the health lectures and spiritual messages. Mukam and Gimil were impressed that these Christians had brought them a new understanding of God's Word. When leaders of other churches tried to convince Mukam to reject the "heretic" Adventists, Mukam refused. "What have they taught that is against the Bible?" he asked. The accusers could not answer, but they warned the couple that they might lose their salvation if they listened to such "heresy." But Mukam and Gimil stood firm and were among the first 17 people who prepared for baptism. Another 50 were baptized several months later, and the group of believers has continued to grow.
The group needed a church, and Mukam offered part of his two-acre rice paddy. Their home stood on the highest land, which sloped down to a creek that sometimes flooded during heavy rains. When the pastor suggested that the lowland was not suitable for a church, the couple asked for time to think about what to do.
The next day the pastor returned to find Mukam and Gimil's house gone. "What happened?" he asked, shocked. Gimil explained that her relatives helped her tear down their house to make room for the new church. With the materials they had saved from their home, they built a lean-to on the side of their son's house nearby.
"It is our sacrifice of love to our God," Mukam said. With help from the conference, the members built a church that seats 200 people.
Adventist work is spreading quickly in this region of India. Mukam and Gimil's church has spawned three other churches in nearby villages. Several new congregations have formed, and more villages have asked Adventists to come and teach them God's Word. Today 2,000 Adventists worship in four churches and 20 companies in the area.
Our mission offerings help advance the work of Christ in India and around the world.
Ramesh Rathod is a district pastor in the Surat region of western India.
|Produced by the General Conference Office
of Mission Awareness
website: www.adventistmission.org
Join the SSNET moderated email discussion group. You are also warmly invited to join a group discussion of this lesson Sabbath morning with your local Seventh-day Adventist congregation.
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Last updated March 15, 2006.


text:
Meet and Eat: Gracie Dulik, Serious Eats Intern
Getting to know the folks behind the food and drinks you love.
Name: Gracie Dulik
Location: Palo Alto, CA / Durham, NC / New York, NY
Occupation: Student at Duke University
Website/Twitter: @graciedulik
Guilty pleasures? I can't resist a classic grilled American cheese sandwich on white bread. Also in the running are salt and vinegar flavored potato chips, microwave popcorn and hot dogs grilled until they are just about burnt. And I have an unhealthy love affair with butter.
Describe your perfect meal. Something fried. Bacon. Avocado. Steak. Melted cheese. Sriracha. Runny egg yolk. Crusty sourdough bread. Butter. Molten dark chocolate.
What food won't you eat? I am very particular about the textures of my food, so things that are too weirdly slimy generally gross me out. I have a hard time eating Jello or most puddings and some fruits and vegetables that get mushy when they are cooked (like eggplant, yuck).
Favorite food person? Anthony Bourdain, because he is absolutely fearless and eats some things I don't think I could ever have the stomach for myself. I'll have to look past his feud with Paula Deen because I continue to admire her undying penchant for deep-frying whenever possible.
When did you first realize you were a serious eater? It was an evolving process, probably beginning with large family meals at our favorite dim sum restaurant in San Francisco and continuing onto my youthful habit of eating four In-N-Out burgers at a time.
What do your family and friends think of your food obsessions? My family is big on eating and cooking so they are used to my fetishes. Many of my friends do not understand my particular food cravings that must be satisfied ASAP, but it usually ends up benefiting them when they come along for the ride.
Favorite food sites or blogs (besides SE)? Anywhere I can waste a significant amount of time looking at pictures of delicious food. Food Porn Daily never disappoints (that's why I set it as my Internet homepage).
Who's your go-to person when you need restaurant recommendations? Depends on the city I'm in, but I can usually always trust my mom to point me in the right direction. She is an amazing home cook and totally approves of my quest to secure the best possible meal.
What is your favorite meal of the day and where do you get it? It is a tough choice, but I keep coming back to breakfast. It can have so many variations: salty, sweet, meaty, bagel-y. At school in Durham, North Carolina I love Foster's Market for home-style Southern brunch, while at home in Palo Alto you can't beat the Creamery Fountain & Grill for classic diner hashbrowns.
Do you ever cook? What's the best dish you make? I would classify myself as a relatively beginner cook, but eager to get better. I am extremely biased towards my own scrambled eggs.
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


text:
Jan 17, 2017
Hello Ros,
I have now paid the invoice, but I would like to write to you just to say a big THANK YOU for getting me the Penguin!
The ChatterMate Penguin became a nice memory for me when I was in New Zealand, and I am so greatful to you for arranging so that I could have it! :-)
Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Ros,
Many thanks for your very kind email. I really appreciate your prompt reply!
I appreciate your advice regarding the decorations and customs. These are a gift for my daughter's exchange student family so when she returns home on the weekend I will show her and see if she loves them as much as I do!
Thanks so very much again - I am truly grateful for your kind assistance.
Kind Regards
Thanks again for the great customer service. It's a refreshing change!
Best regards,
Hey Roz,
Thank you for your emails. Just loved my first order. The cute little Aussie bush critters are going to be used for an office Christmas decoration. My colleagues also liked them and talked about making an order to your site. I'll send you a photo when completed.
I'll be ordering more to send to my daughter's host family in America.
Fabulous service from you.
Kind regards,
Thankyou. Order arrived today. One very happy grandson with his new beastly binoculars.
Home / Online Shop / Jewellery
Cute silver crustacean earrings.
These tiny cute crab charms are made from Tibetan silver, the hooks are sterling silver plated and made into earrings here in Australia.
Wear your love of the ocean with these fun loving silver crab earrings.
These earrings make delightful gifts for friends and family here in Australia or overseas.
Australia has many different species of crustaceans but Christmas Island just off the northern coast of Australia is home to one of the worlds great migrations of the Red Crab that march across the island around November/December every year. It's such a sight that it has even caught the attention of Sir David Attenborough.
For hygiene reasons The Land Down Under - Australia does not allow exchanges or returns on earrings - please choose carefully.
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text:
The world depends on mariners. Mariners depend on SCI. And we depend on you.
Photos from a shoot with Moran Towing in the Port of New York and New Jersey, November 2011.
Photos by Gregory Thorp.
The Seamen's Church Institute cares for the hardworking men and women of maritime commerce, but our mission would not be possible without the help of individuals, churches, corporations and foundations that work with SCI to meet their needs.


text:
Posted by Editor on 03/18/08
Cipollini Retires ... Again
After a return to racing at the Amgen Tour of California with Rock Racing, Mario Cipollini issued a statement today that he is retired - this time for good, it appears.
Cipollini came out of retirement at the age of 40 to race for the controversial Michael Ball, and surprised more than a few by being competitive, finishing third behind Tom Boonen in one stage, as well as recording other top-10 results.
He had said that his return was linked to a manager-rider role for a European-based squad, and made it clear that he wanted to race Milan-San Remo this weekend on his 41st birthday. However, things began to fall apart with his relationship to Rock Racing, and rumours were surfacing in the Italian press that he would race for the Tinkoff team at Milan-San Remo.
Almost simultaneously today, Cipollini and Rock Racing released statements saying that they had cut ties:
Cipollini - "My professional relationship with the American team Rock Racing has finished. The plan to contest Milan-San Remo would have been meaningful if it was connected to the building and management of a new team, that in practice, despite contractual agreements, happened without the least reference to me."
"My return to competition was a stepping stone in a much larger plan to create a 'dream team'. It's a shame, but at the same time I'm grateful to all those people who have shown me warmth, support and affection over the past few months."
Michael Ball - "From a business perspective and from an overall team standpoint, the relationship between Mario Cipollini and Rock Racing was not advantageous, and would not work long-term. We have terminated his contract and wish him luck in future endeavors."
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