• And now for something a little lighter

    The Rays game was on in the background as I fiddled with the trusty PowerBook. The Rays were down their customary 3-4 runs after 3 innings when I was finishing up the last entry.

    Then I looked up and saw Greg Norton smack one over the fence, and my brain said, “that’s got ‘you’re such a big, strong bat… and I deserve a spanking’ written all over it. And that’s no small feat, considering baseballs are pretty small, and there isn’t a whole lot of room for a lot of dialog.”

    I’ll bet you had no idea you were going to be reading an R rated post about baseball this evening, did you?

    Must be the Vicodin again.

    P.S. It’s hard to believe I hadn’t taught my spell check dictionary the spelling for “Vicodin” by now.

    P.P.S. Has there ever been a rookie gold glove winner; and if so, does fieldwork not directly related to catching (arm strength, accuracy, and assists) qualify you for one?

  • Not your father’s Friday

    In the last 24 hours I’ve had two phone conversations with my children.

    Beth hasn’t been sleeping at night and needed another run down of all the drugs I’m taking, how they work, and why they’ll make me better.

    Beth is a happy child; everyone usually says so.

    So it broke my heart to hear the anxiety in her voice, and not be able to take it away.

    Adam has been telling everyone that my wife “is on her way to pick up daddy.” He asked me if I was picking him up after work today.

    Adam is a lovable little boy; someone you can come home and just squeeze, and who can sometimes give as good as he gets.

    So it broke my heart to tell him no, and not be able to do damn thing for the terrible understanding I heard in his little boy voice.

    Right now… perhaps now more than ever, I need a really big squeeze.

  • Sucks like an American vacuum plugged into a European power outlet

    The Euros run more juice through their sockets, right?

    No matter. Fact checking is for sissies (as they say on The Report).

    The latest word from the good doctor is “wait,” as in, “we’re going to have to wait before we send you home.”

    Here’s a few more words he used: “next,” “week,” “uncomfortable,” and the ever popular “estimating” (when used in conjunction with “uncomfortable”).

    I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to discuss how I’ve been feeling, owing to it’s graphic nature; but I’m perfectly willing to toss around some euphemisms, if that will satisfy any latent curiosity floating around. For example: my food processor has been having problems north and south of the border. What would otherwise be normal deposits at the nearby collection center feel like the battery is somehow leaking into the exhaust. And there’s a wild, half clean animal all wound up and skulking around as if he were chained down in a cage during mating season.

    Like everything else, it could all be much worse. Tomorrow I can look forward to tooling around with the Reunion software upgrade I bought this evening.

    Here’s to life’s simple pleasures.

    The truly good news is that the chemo is done. It hasn’t quite finished having it’s way with my body’s rapidly reproducing cells, but the corner is nigh! Shots of Neupogen have begun, to try to boost the production of my white blood cells (they tell me a count of 200 is low). And, I learned a new word today: Thrush. (Truth be told, I had heard of a bird referred to as a “Thrush.”) In this case, Thrush is a fungual infection in a person’s mouth, made possible due to immunosuppression. There’s another place this fungal infection can attack (in the non-immunosuppressed), but I have a few sensibilities, and I don’t want to discuss it.

    So there!