Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose, and sometimes you do both at the same time. Take yesterday afternoon… the Patriots absolutely destroyed the Bucs. As a fan of both formerly hapless franchises, this was a terrible game to watch… and a great game to watch.

More and more, I find that this sort of thing is the rule in my life. Have a healthy child… and worry about him conking himself senseless on the tile. Watch him conk himself half senseless on the tile, and see him bounce back with a great big grin… as if nothing had happened.

I wonder if there’s any research on correlations between watching sports and life expectancy?

A week or so ago my wife dropped a Best Buy bag in my lap. “Here,” she says, “this is for you.”

I peeked in the bag and what did I see? A new Palm handheld just for me.

Since my PDA is basically my life (while I’m at work), and since I’ve been carrying around two half dead PDAs for the last four months (each was broken in a manner that complemented the other), a new one was just what I needed.

Here’s the icing on top… the new PDA is wi-fi capable… and so are the area malls. So this Christmas shopping season, while my wife has been in the stores, I’ve been outside browsing the web with the kids. We went shopping with Cheryl’s parents, and me and her father hung back and followed the play-by-play for the game – via ESPN.com.

It’s not a lot, but sometimes even the simplest pleasures can make all the difference.

One of the hallmarks of the low self-esteem personality is a tendency to poke fun at others. Having said that, I’d like to share an amusing tale about my wife.

Lost isn’t just something I do out in public, it’s also a television series on ABC. My sister is hooked. Several of my co-workers are hooked. Me? I need another television show to watch like I need higher interest rates. So of course, I rented season one through Netflix. I watched disk one and I was hooked. I couldn’t wait for disk two to get back to me… so instead I asked Netflix to send me disk three, and I bought the episodes from disk two from iTunes. So there I was, settling down to disk three, and Cheryl walks into the room. I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want to watch with me.

“I watched two episodes and I thought it looked stupid.”

Insert knife, twist, remove, repeat.

One night later Cheryl sits with me to watch the next episode.

“So, you’re slumming tonight Cheryl?”

“Well, there’s nothing else on TV and I’m bored.”

Three nights later… two days after disk three goes in the mail to Neftlix…

“John, when’s the next Lost disk going to get here? It seems like it’s been, like, a week.”

“Dude, it was, like, yesterday, you know? Like, climb down off your cow man. I thought you didn’t even like, like lost?”MARY–
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