On and on it goes

I'm now missing my 6th week of work. The best thing I can say is that it hasn't gotten noticeably worse. But it hasn't gotten better either. I've actually had to edge the amount of pain medication I'm taking back up because I was too uncomfortable and not sleeping again.

Constant pain is kind of like a Dementor. It just sucks the life right out of you. I'll have moments when I'm motivated to get something done and then a minute later I'm grabbing my side and heading back to the couch.

Sorry to be depressing here, but I think it's one of the jobs of the unhappy to spread their misery around a bit. I continue to spend much of my time watching TV sports and fortunately there's still enough baseball to complement the soccer.

I did want to get back to the business of sports watching, so I'll touch on baseball here. The baseball has been, for the most part, reasonably compelling. The biggest problem with consuming the broadcasts is the disparity in the quality of the announcers from game to game. When there were 4 series at once, the talent was spread dangerously thin. On one hand, the Yankees games have been handled by Ernie Johnson and John Smoltz, who are both excellent, ably assisted by either Cal Ripken or Ron Darling.

Tigers-A's, on the other hand, was done by someone I don't know, but it doesn't matter, because far too much of the talking was done by Buck Martinez, who has admirable hair but simply does not know when to shut up. He is also perhaps the worst interviewer currently working on national TV, with a penchant for asking questions that are so leading and so long that there is rarely anything left to the interviewee to say. There should be a word for that, asking a question in such a way that the question includes the answer.

The other problem is the commercials. I understand that there are a limited number of advertisers willing to spend heavily on baseball, but can't we do something to force them to have more than one commercial? Sometimes I wish they'd just play the ad 25 times in a row and be done with it. I will never eat anything containing avocado ever again and people usually destroy their cars in far less entertaining ways than in the insurance commercial I've seen probably 100 times in the last 10 days.

And I've now seen so many Viagra and Cialis commercials that anytime I see a reasonably mature man and woman (as opposed to the men and women in beer commercials) in a commercial I immediately think he has erectile disfunction but thanks to modern medicine he's still going to have sex soon. This is disconcerting when I then see a Lowe's commercial where a couple is making s'mores with two young children and I'm assuming they're about to leave the kids by the fire to go do the nasty.

At this moment, Fox has decided that a test pattern, occasionally interrupted by commercials, is the appropriate thing to show to pass the time during a rain delay.

So this is my life right now. I am ready to move on to a new phase.