Apologies and explanations

I'd like to apologize to my readers--if you're still there--and offer a couple of explanations as to why I have been unable to maintain this blog for the past year or so:

• Since July/August last year, my after-office hours have been increasingly devoted to other activities primarily those associated with my parish here. Moreover my workload at the office has increased considerably. As a consequence I now come home late or am too exhausted to do anything else beyond grabbing a bite for dinner when I get home.
• I no longer get to watch tennis matches live on television. The sports cable channels that used to air the main ATP events like the grand slams and the Master Series tournaments here in my corner of the world have apparently decided to not buy the rights to show the tennis matches. Nowadays I have to resort to either (1) watching live streaming video of matches which more often are of poor quality as I can't afford to pay for a subscription with a higher bandwidth; (2) watching live scores online which while extremely suspenseful is totally boring; or, worst of all, (3) reading about the outcomes of the tennis matches afterwards.

As you can see, it's not because of Roger's "failures" last year. I remain a devout fan and try my best to keep tabs with Roger's progress through the season. It's just that so many other things beyond my control have cropped up since then that I simply have had little time to work on this and no longer have the resources to produce the kind of material that I would like to post to this blog. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to come up with something once in a while--especially when there's a lull at work.

Besides, there's Wimbledon to look forward to and Star Sports will start airing that in two weeks! Yipee!!

Welcome

Hi. I don't know exactly how many blogs there are out there about the tennis great Roger Federer, but I thought I'd start one myself since anyway I've been collecting news clippings about him from online news websites almost from the day he became No. 1. (I've got an entire directory of text files containing articles I've cut and paste from the Internet!) And in a way, this would be a good time to start one, just after he's set a record for the most number of consecutive weeks at No. 1.

Of course, he's being No. 1 is not the main reason why I've become a fan of his. In fact, I became fan long before he became No. 1 and that was when I saw him play against Schalken during the 2003 Wimbledon quarterfinals. I didn't play tennis and had hardly watched any tennis myself before then but somehow I sensed that he was far and away different from the other players I had seen play and that he could defeat Andy Roddick in the semis and probably go on to win the title that year, which he did! Then his tears of joy during the awarding ceremony further endeared him to me and my friends who were watching and rooting for him. Awww...