Back from exile

Well, at least temporarily.

Nothing like a self-imposed hiatus to fill your mind with crap to spill. I haven't written for various reasons, none of them noteworthy, but I've thought about it almost daily.

Almost nothing in my recent life has been of any wide-spread interest. I've just been sitting around, doing work and paying loose attention to the sporting universe. And rocking my baby to sleep.

My wife and I were just commenting the other day on how much time a baby can sap away. Not to sound negative. Just that I get home every day at 6pm or so, and the next time I look at the clock it's already 8pm, and the next time it's 10pm, and between all of these it seems as if just a few minutes have passed.

Infants are a marvel in this way. We move our clocks back and forth to manipulate time twice a year. Babies don't need such artificial measures. They are like a time black hole. When you are near them, your time disappears.

I'm getting a vague sense of what all those parents were saying to all those kids for all those years. "I remember, it seems like just yesterday, you were in diapers..." My baby's still in diapers, but just yesterday she was an 8 pound miracle, and now she's a 17 pound chatter-box. Just yesterday I was waiting for her to stop sleeping so much and start doing baby stuff. Just an hour ago she cracked her first smile. 10 minutes ago she started holding her feet up with her hands while I changed her diaper. 20 seconds ago she learned to reach out for her toys, hold onto them, manipulate them. In 10 minutes, she'll be walking and talking. In 20, she'll be in a school play. In an hour she'll be off to college, and I'll be scratching my head wondering where the hell all that time went.

Amazing. Kids are a wormhole in space-time. They warp you through, and you realize that while you were watching this little marvel evolve, the whole world just passed you by. And, because you love the marvel so much, it's okay. You wouldn't have it any other way.

When I'm not focussed on the little one, though, I get to pass the fleeting moments with other minor interests. Most of them sports-related.

The Blazers
Man, the Portland Trailblazers just continue to break a brother's heart, don't they? What's the deal with these guys?

Granted, I haven't been able to pay as much attention recently as I should, but from what I have noticed, there isn't much reason to so far.

Zach is the same guy he was 2 years ago. He shows flashes of the great player he could be, and then settles back into the mediocrity he's accepting from himself.

Darius is a lost cause. Paul Allen either can't accept it, or won't. We are, hopefully, not the last team enamored with his potential. Who cares if he breaks out on another team? The problem is, he's not going to do it here.

Telfair, who was so incredible back in the day, got so used to being the man in high school that he doesn't know how to accept a supporting role here. So many of the great PG's, like Nash and Kidd, are what they are because they are great individually, but more importantly elevate the play of those around them. Damon suffered the same problem when he was here: he wanted to be the scoring PG that Iverson has made so popular. But the fact is that Iverson is able to do what he does so well because he's Iverson; he's the exception that proves the rule.

Ratliff has returned from being a contract-year monster to being one of the more predictably useless, injured, over-paid players in the league. He's a good guy, but despite our wishes for character, you have to have a balance of off-court greatness and on-court ... well, in this case, anything on-court would be better than what we're getting from this guy, wouldn't it?

Przybilla suffers, as so many do, with being a quality guy in a non-quality situation. He's the Abdur-Rahim of this year's roster, trying to establish his value on a team that sucks you of your worth. I love Joel's play and his heart, but I hope for his sake that he finds a team willing to pay him and willing to commit to winning, and he goes there and thrives.

There's hope for the future. Blake shows promise. Jack probably shows more; with McMillan at the helm, perhaps we can get past the expectations that we attached to Telfair and see that one of these two is the future. Martell is all up-side, as far as I'm concerned. Outlaw will be a monster once he gets his head around the game as much as his heart is. That's three solid positions. We should draft fairly well, and that will just increase my excitement about tomorrow. But today? Who cares anymore?

NCAA Tourney
My second year following the tourney, and man was it exciting. My brackets at ESPN and CBS Sportsline were all, of course, pretty busted early on, but the wide-range of upsets sure made it interesting. That is, until the end, when none of my teams were in it anymore. Once the predictable end of George Mason's run finally arrived (sure, I'd predicted it two rounds earlier, but it was predicted nonetheless), there really wasn't much to draw me in.

How many of you saw Florida taking it all when you were setting up your brackets? And how many guessed they'd be winning it all over UCLA?

Fantasy Baseball
Though I'm not really much of a baseball guy, I realized that having the bracket gave me something to think about in my freetime other than babies and bills, and so I decided to see how I liked fantasy sports. At Sportsline's website, I set up two different leagues. In my first one, I really didn't think much about what I was doing. It's filled with people I don't know, and so I'm not following it too closely.

My second league contains 4 friends, myself, and some random folks to close the group out. With the friend angle, it's much more interesting. At breakfast last weekend, my friend and I broke into a side conversation about our pitching options while our wives cooed over the babies. While working the other day, I Google-chatted with a pal about potential trades.

My team in both leagues is called "Sofa King Awesome," in recognition of the funniness of a friend-o'-mine's dodgeball team name. That's right, I said it. Dodgeball. Apparently, she's found a competitive league in Portland, and she's religiously attended games every Thursday. Her team's called "Sofa King Rad," which is also funny, but lacks the even number of syllables that makes me like my version better.

Currently I'm in second place in my second league. Sofa Kings forever.

Anyway, after much harassment from Denise (who's blog, last time I checked, was entirely outdated) about not posting any kid pics, I put the slide presentation below in. I think it'll change as I add photos there. Hopefully that'll keep you off my back for awhile, my fellow slackers...