&^%

I've got to start going to bed earlier. The amount of sleep that I get on a nightly basis seems to be getting shorter and shorter. I can't totally blame the Olympics either, even though I have been pretty well nailed to the couch in front of the 42" plasma that is nailed to my living room wall each day and night for the last week.

I get home from running around wherever I am and there's always a stack of dishes or a pile of laundry or some unfinished business on my laptop beckoning. It's oh so hard for me to do those dishes by hand lately. I really need to save my nickels and buy some dishwasher detergent. I rather miss the quiet hum of my KitchenAid's 75 minute cycle. Oddly, the sound provides a comforting contrast to the rampant chatter that goes on all hours of the night on the street below.

Getting some sleep might get me back on the routine of the early morning workouts that get my day started off right. I'm feeling like a bit of a slacker these days with the limited cardio workouts I'm doing because of the increasing amount of pain in my left knee. I'll undergo arthroscopic surgery on September 5 that will hopefully straighten me out and get me back to normal. I promise to take it easy this time and not play as much basketball. Really, I do. Do you believe me? Yeah, I don't really believe me either.

I might now have much of a choice though because as I sit here, I am reminded by a sharp pain that my lower back is pretty "sometimey", as they say. Nobody ever tells you about getting old. Youth is truly wasted on the young. If I had the presence of mind to look for all of the angles and wait for the game to slow down to a snails pace so that I could approach it with the precision of a surgeon disecting the defense with methodical grace, perhaps my joints wouldn't be so worn, nor my cartilege so frayed. As always, hindsight is truly 20/20.