Flaming (Lips? Moes?) Toes

SO Friday was relatively uneventful (for me; Beck won over yet another vet clinic in the S'th. Huzzah! She is kicking ass and taking names. Or something). Went for a little run at one point and had to stop because of my toe - I took my shoes / socks off to discover a slightly ingrown toe-nail. Argh. So I did the usual self-surgery, clipped the offending nail bit off, soaked it in hot water and then bacitracin-ed it up. All was good with the world. Made myself a little pizza sandwich thingy for dinner and settled down to watch the basketball games - Gringoat were nice enough to call and invite me to Bauhinia (sp?), but I had just clicked the on button on the remote when the phone rang. So that was a no go, and I told them I'd see them early in the AM. More on that later...

So good times with the basketball - Georgetown won on a buzzer beater (where the guy blatantly traveled) and UNC demolished USC. Fun. I also devoted an inordinate amount of time on Friday to fantasy baseball - the drafts for my two leagues are coming up (today and Tuesday), so I had to set my draft order, which just takes forever if you want to do it to any reasonable extent. And yes, I noticed how much time I was wasting repeatedly throughout the process. Sigh.

So I finally got to bed fairly late after the basketball, which was stupid because I had told GG I would pick them up at 5:30 to whisk them down to Logan (they are LA bound). But I figured everything would be okay - except at 2:45 or so...

ATTACK OF THE GOUT!

I got that great sensation that they always talked about in school re: the gout, that it's so painful and sensitive that if the bed sheets brush your toe you'll scream. Well, that's pretty much exactly how it felt - my toe flared up like MAD. In the middle of the night! So I went walking in my sleep and extracted the additional part of the nail that I had missed that was still sticking into my soft toey flesh. Ouch. And I had to soak it in the tub for 20 minutes beforehand in order to be able to attempt this. Plus did I mention the SCREAMING PAIN that had taken me straight from REM stage to battle-the-invading-martians level of alertness. Egads. So I eventually managed to ply the nail out the bed and clipped the offending part off and more or less got instant relief - it still hurt from being sore and swollen, but there's nothing like removing an organic blade to relieve pain. Ah, nice. But at this point it's about 4:30 and I need to get up at 5 so... I got up and worked on my draft order some more.

Needless to say, my Saturday was spent in a haze. But I got gringoat to the airport - we actually had an awesome time, or as awesome as one can have at ass AM (many jokes about corvettes on Dunkin menus) - and I must have done a really good job because Ben tipped me at the end. Seriously, this was one of the funnier situational comedy moments I've experienced - I was helping Ali get her bag out of the trunk right as ben was handing me money for the mass pike tolls, so it definitely looked like a typical customer-porter exchange. Ali afterwards said she felt dirty. Anyways, they headed off away from the sunrise, and I headed back to lonely Grafton...

And had about enough time to walk the pups and eat a bowl of Kix when I had to head back out for the first of four consecutive tutoring appointments. Yowsers - not that it's really that bad, but I was half asleep and choking down coffee the whole while, so it turned into some kind of existential experience. Plus it took 40 minutes to explain the Hershey Chase experiment to the last kid, something that should probably take two. So I finally came back (after a grocery store stop) to crash...

But no! More basketball! OSU to be exact. I have decided that stoic Greg Oden is awesome. Here's a picture, and remember that this guy is 19 years old:

He has a little bit of the look and definitely the attitude of Robert Parish, a Celtics center from the 80s. In fact...
Do you see it, at least a little bit? Both 7 feet tall, both crack a smile approximately never. That's the main similarity, the "I'm above this emotional crap" facial expression. Anyhoo, Oden, except for constantly being in foul trouble, is a total beast and very much fun to watch. So that has been cool. BUT I stayed up to watch the games, so here I am another day later and STILL exhausted. I actually didn't stay up all that late - went to bed at about 9:30 and missed Beck's boyfriend aka Peyton on SNL last night - and have a vague memory of Beck calling here after her shower / dinner festivities in San Antonio - but I woke up this morning at about 7 all wired because Fantasy Draft with the Emen starts in a couple of hours. Oh, boy! I will be sure to post the results... for now, I'll leave you with my top 20 picks, which pretty much match everybody else's top few picks:

1. Albert Pujols
2. José Reyes
3. Álex Rodríguez
4. Ryan Howard
5. Chase Utley
6. David Ortiz
7. Carl Crawford
8. Alfonso Soriano
9. Johan Santana
10. Miguel Cabrera
11. David Wright
12. Vladimir Guerrero
13. Lance Berkman
14. Jimmy Rollins
15. Travis Hafner
16. Carlos Beltrán
17. Grady Sizemore
18. Derek Jeter
19. Miguel Tejada
20. Manny Ramíre