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A Wild and Manic Mad Dash to Complete Exhaustion!Woo-boy am I exhausted. I have been so freaking busy these last two weeks that I've felt just plain zoned half this weekend.
 Last Saturday was our fantasy baseball draft. For the so-geekily-inclined, you can read about my draft here. The draft is the best time of the season (unless you win, of course), and even though the bloody thing lasts about 10 hours these days, I always look forward to it, I always have a good time, and I'm always glad I did it afterwards. It's taken quite a few years but I finally have some confidence that I am a good drafter, even if I feel kind of nervous about my teams coming out of the drafts - every single year. I have yet to win this league - which features some extremely tough competition - but I've been competitive almost every year, in the sense that I regularly finish in the money. I can't remember if I ever write about the experience of the draft itself, and I'm too lazy to go look now. So I'll jot down a few things. These days the draft occurs at the house of a league member (Chris) who lives a couple of blocks from me. I'm the league commissioner, which mostly means that I get to coordinate the draft itself and that people get mad at me once or twice a year for either acting or not acting when something someone perceives to be an unfair move is made. The former is a much bigger pain in the ass than the latter, let me tell you. This year I put my foot down and made sure everyone knew we'd be starting the draft promptly and anyone not there would have their picks made for them. I nearly pulled it off, too! :-) I went over to Chris' house the night before to check out the venue (even though we used it last year) and help test and set up the Internet connection, since half our members are remote (only 7 of the 16 were physically present this year - same as last year). Good thing I went, too, since the router was fuxxored until Chris and I managed to figure out that we had stuff plugged into the wrong port, and that we needed to reset the router so we could change its configuration to properly forward IP addresses. What a pain in the ass. Fortunately I had the bright idea in one of the brief times when my laptop could actually connect to the net to download the manual for the router, and a lifesaver that was. The net is great - assuming you can get to it. I showed up at Chris' house at 11 am on Saturday morning. Subrata showed up not too much later with the pre-made draft sheets, which I taped up on the wall. These are rapidly becoming obsolesced by our various technical solutions for draft problems, but we're a slave to tradition. It's just not the same if someone (usually me) doesn't go home with a whole bunch of Crayola marker ink on his hands. We started the draft at 10 past noon with only one member absent. No idea where he was, but he arrived (on-line) in time for the second round. Unfortunately he had two picks in the first round (since draft picks can be traded in our league). He was okay with the guys we picked for him, though. (He bloody well should be - I think he got a good deal on one of them.) Things went smoothly, all-in-all. I think my brain started to melt around 6 pm when we had passed out of the zone of good players and into the "can I search through the scrap heap fast enough to find someone half-decent for my next pick" realm of players. Actually I made a number of good picks at the back end of the draft I think - if I'm lucky they'll save me from some of the crummy picks I made in the front half. Gah. The best part of the draft is the trash-talk. We're all smart guys, and smart asses, too, so we have informed but sharp-edged comments to make about other peoples' picks. I'm just a little more out there than most, and usually I get in one or two of the best zingers. I don't recall that I had any really memorable ones this year. I don't think I'll ever top the one from a few years ago, the year Ken Griffey Jr. suffered his first major injury during the draft after he'd already been picked in the first round. "Well, at least he hit a home run for you today," I quipped, knowing that stats don't count for our league until the Monday after the draft. I picks up several high-risk/high-reward players I had on my radar screen, which made me happy. I also made a pick which is somewhat out of character for me: Zack Greinke. Greinke is a pitcher who was a highly-touted prospect with the (godawful) Kansas City Royals two years ago. He had a great first year in the Majors, and a terrible second year. Subrata was trying to decide whether to keep him, and the two of us (as is our wont) has lengthy chats about him during the winter. I really didn't see a whole lot to like about him, based on his 2005 performance, and didn't think he was worth keeping. Especially since he went on the disabled list (until June) with "personal problems" (or as I put it, "a sprained brain"). I picked him in a late round, announcing I was doing it to amuse Subrata, but really I figured he was a good pick on the chance that in fact I was all wrong about him. I don't know it all, and it might well be that I'm just missing the forest for the trees. At that point, it seemed like something worth taking a gamble on. It would be a true irony if he comes back in June and saves my pitching staff. People started to zone out around 7 or 8 pm, and by 9:30 people were scrambling to find anyone worth drafting at all. (With my last pick I picked a guy who was drafted out of college last year and had pitched all of one game in professional baseball.) We wrapped up around 10, and it took us all of about 15 minutes to tear down - we're nothing if not efficient. Subrata and I walked back to my house (where he'd parked his car), exhausted but happy. Happy to have done it, and happy it was over.
Sunday Debbi and I had some friends over to dye Easter eggs. Debbi was a little surprised that I wanted to dye eggs, but I enjoy it. At least doing a few eggs. My mind was wandering a lot on Sunday, and I broke out my new set of Skyrail Suspension marble roller-coaster construction pieces. I built the whole thing and Debbi and I had a great time rolling marbles down it for a while. In the evening I went to my book discussion group at Kepler's, where we discussed Hope Miirlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. Despite being strongly recommended by Neil Gaiman, I found it to walk that fine line between trifle and tedium. Written in the 1920s, I found it didn't really have anything new to say about this brand of fairy fantasy - a genre which interests me barely at all, anyway. Friends say that the purpose is in the approach to the writing and turns of phrase, although I mostly found the writing to be pretty bad, very much in the "tell-don't-show" vein. The plot made little sense, the characters and their motivations were often obscure or unbelievable. It just didn't really work on any level for me. Of course, now I can see where Gaiman got some of the inspiration for his novel Stardust. Then again, Stardust is a prime example of Gaiman writing which I don't enjoy, as opposed to, say, American Gods. The discussion also had two other moments of note: The moderator gets advance copies of many books, and he recalled that I'm a big fan of Vernor Vinge, and gave me his advance copy of Vinge's next novel, Rainbows End, due out next month. Naturally, I'm nearly done with it... The other moment is that the moderator of the group os moving out of the area, and we won't know for a bit who will take over the job. Joe is the second moderator of the group, having been in the role for about 3 years. (I'm the longest-standing member of the group, having joined in early 2000 shortly after I moved to the area.) I do know that I don't want to take over the job, as I have enough to keep myself occupied these days. Maybe more than enough! On top of that - although not strictly related to Sunday - I recently learned that one of my best friends is moving out of the area and back to his home state of Texas. This is a big bummer, as we have a lot of fun together, especially nattering away about baseball. But he has some excellent family-related reasons for moving. I'd hoped that he would decide on his other plan to find a new house in the bay area, but I guess he decided he just couldn't swing it. Sigh. With my friend Rob having moved away last year, it's starting to feel a little lonely around here...
The week was just crazy-busy. I finished my taxes and mailed them. I played poker, and won a whole $5. I went to gaming and managed to absolutely beat the pants off of everyone else at Robo Rally, something I very rarely manage to do. Somehow I managed to sneak in and touch a checkpoint just before a horde of robots descended on it and started beating the crap out of each other. Lucky, really, but a lot of fun. Usually I seem to come in second at Subrata's gaming nights. Which I guess is better than last! The amazing torrents of rain subsided long enough for us to have a stunning day of 70-degree weather on Thursday. Bizarre. The rain came back for the weekend. How nice. I spent the weekend mostly trying to de-stress from the week, doing things like reading and writing a huge journal entry and running errands and that sort of thing. I think we got everything we needed to do this weekend, including watching my friend Andrew's cats. I think they almost warmed up to us, by the end! Tonight we watched the next three episodes of the new Doctor Who, which Subrata has been saving on DVD for us. The sixth episode, "Dalek", is absolutely fantastic, both a clever nod to the original series and a defining moment for the new series. It exactly captures the ruthlessness of the Daleks, while showing what a different situation the Doctor is in now in the wake of the Time War. It seems like any good series has one episode that shows that it's really seriously worth its salt, and I think "Dalek" is the one for this series.
I really need to slow down and take a break. I feel spread far too thin these days. I'm hoping to be able to do that real soon. I hope I hope I hope.
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