Uh, where am I ... ?

Dateline: Washington, D.C., a little after midnight.

I love baseball; I haven't followed it daily and religiously for a few years, but I still love the opportunity to sit and watch a ballgame. I had this opportunity Tuesday night. I celebrated the way I usually celebrate when I watch a game on TV: I feel asleep. Woke up in an oops-I-fell-asleep-watching-TV fog about 20 minutes ago.

The fog, of course, obscures whatever it is I was just going to type. So now I'm kind of winging it ...

I just noticed that I missed an entire month of posting, for the first time since we launched this forum back in October 2001. I guess I can't really be surprised. March 2005 was a busy month, too busy; the kind of month where the engine was running at redline but the car wasn't really going anywhere.

When I finally escaped the March madness (not to be confused with March Madness, in which three of my Final Four picks were eliminated before the round of eight), I emerged with a nice raise, a new Blackberry, five more pounds, and ... well, and an April calendar that is almost as packed.

The questions come up:

Is it worth it? Well, yeah. It's paying off financially, I'm learning a lot and I'm enjoying myself.
Well, I wasn't really asking about you. What about your family? I miss my family. They say they miss me. I try to maximize the time I have at home. One of the reasons that the travel schedule has become so frantic is that I'm taking those Businessman's Special flights, the flights that 1/allow you to leave at 5:55 a.m. to make a 10 a.m. meeting and/or 2/leave the job site at 9 p.m., which get you home at 2 a.m., but at least it's home and not another night in the hotel room. Some of my co-workers prefer a more relaxed travel schedule, where they have an extra night on either end of the trip and less rush to the airport. Not me, not now.
OK, come back and answer my first question: Is it worth it? Well, it beats the hell out of spending 9 hours a day behind a desk.
You haven't answered my question. Hey, you know what? You're starting to annoy me. Define "worth it." I'm still trying to.

Ugh, the fog. I hate falling asleep while watching TV.

So anyway, I have a BlackBerry. No more searching for wireless hotspots in airports. I could conceivably post directly from my airplane seat before they tell me to turn off all portable electronic devices. E-mail, AIM, phone and the web, all at my fingertips, all the time.

All. The. Time.

Overall, this is probably not a good thing.

Time to concede to the fog. Time to go to sleep for real. Day 103 of 2005 starts for me in a few hours.

Nothing left of me

Just had a long, long five days in southern New Hampshire. Talk about leaving it all on the field. I am just flat exhausted. So tired I can't sleep. I hate that feeling.

All I can do is write about it

I never intended for this to become a monthly publication. Really, I didn't. It's just ... well, anything I use to finish that sentence would simply be an excuse, and there is no room for excuses here.

I think a lot. That's what you do when you're on the road without anybody; you think. It's rare for all that thought to generate any end result, but I do it anyway because that's all I can do.

A roundup of the recent:

Denmark was fabulous. Cold, but fabulous. The thing that surprised me the most: How not different everything was. I had no trouble finding McDonald's, Burger King and 7-Eleven. People drive on the right. Coke and Pepsi and Marlboros are consumed in large quantities. Sure, some things were quite distinct from what we're used to in the U.S. Gas sells for about $6 a gallon. The sign on the beer cooler in the 7-Eleven translated to, "Don't even think about buying beer if you were born on or before March 8, 1990." More than 49 percent of Danes would have voted against George W. Bush.

But overall, I really expected to feel much more like a foreigner than I did. I'm not sure to what that should be attributed.

Going back to the Very Large Metropolitan Area was a little weird. I was at the same time homesick and so, so glad to be gone. I visited the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper while I was there; the bad mood created by October's layoffs still remains, like the smell of mildew in a car after the windows were left open during a rainstorm. I finally settled on, "It's very good to have lived here." I'm glad I was there; it's a good thing, however, that I'm not there now.

Now, I'm in a small town in southern New Hampshire, watching the World Champion Red Sox (as they are known here) taking on the Yankees on Opening Night. Last time we were here was in late February. We visited a restaurant in downtown Boston. On the bar TV: A replay of Game 5 of last year's World Series, as if it was on a continuous loop. Oh, yeah, the Patriots won the Super Bowl, too. But the Patriots could win the Super Bowl every year and still not inspire the passion that's generated by the World Champion Red Sox.

The Boy turned 6 last week. He has his first girlfriend, a charming and beautiful little girl named Amelia. He told The Wife, "You know, most of the boys in my class don't like love." He thought about it for a second. "But I think love is important." Spinning lines like that, he has to be very careful about peaking too soon.

The Wife's Champion Dog is pregnant. Anybody want a $1,000 puppy? (You think I'm kidding.)

David Wells just gave up a run-scoring balk. I think I actually heard somebody say,
"Gohddammit, ya fat bastahd!"