Kris tivos Stump the Schwab, a game show wherein contestants test their sports knowledge by answering trivia questions competitively against Howard Schwab, who worked for years as a sports researcher and accumulated vast amounts of sports trivia knowledge.

When I last watched Stump the Scwab, the way it worked was the show host would ask a question, "Name the last 19 men ranked #1 in the ATP rankings," and the answers would display in a list. The contestants would provide an answer in a round-robin fashion, dropping out when they couldn't provide a new, correct answer, until only one contestant (or Schwab) was left. Each correct answer yielded a point, highest points goes to the next round.

The correct answers would disappear from the list, so you could see at a quick glance the correct answers remaining.

Well, they changed it.

Now, instead of displaying all the answers, they display them one at a time as they are correctly guessed by the contestants.

Terribly annoying.

I can no longer hear the question, then cry out, "Wait! Wait! Pause it! Let me see... Safin, Roddick, Federer, Courier, Wilander, Sampras, Kafelnikov, Hewitt, McEnroe, Muster, Moya, Edberg, Agassi!, Becker, Sampras, Rios ... crap! Um, Lendl?" as Kris stares at me in amazement.

This works effectively when the questions are baseball related and Kris says, "daaaa-aaaamn..."

Not realizing, of course, that I've watched the episode already and memorized the answers.

Doesn't have the same effect without the "Wait! Wait! Pause it!"

Stupid Schwab.

"DOG!"

"Time to buy you more underwear?"

"Yeah."

Note to self:

The backpack look?

Not so good.

Oh, sure, it's easy on the back when worn over both shoulders.

But the look of it? Oh, the fashion?

Mmmmmmmm....

No.

Photo by Lloyd, not my photo.

Phew!

That was close!

I almost took myself seriously tonight. Like major seriously. Like disappointment seriously.

And that would have sucked.

Monday morning, blah blah blah, up, do work for an hour, take a shower, start packing up everything, Kris rolls out of bed, starts his oatmeal, plops his butt down on the couch with ESPN playing on the television.

I'm gathering all my stuff to head to the office, when Kris comments, "Wait. You're going to work."

"Uh, yeah, I am."

"No, no, no. You're going to work."

"Yeah."

"You haven't done that in like, years. I mean, sure you'd work at Greg's, or head over to Mike's to work at his place, or maybe head into Krush. But you're usually at the dining room table right there.

But you're heading into work.

Into. Work."

I burst into tears.

Later, three people, two nominally independent of each other, called me a Flock groupie. Now, if I didn't enjoy hanging out with the Flock people a lot, I think I'd be upset at the potential derogatory implications of the term "groupie." But I was too distracted by Mike's comment, "What? Are you trying for a second childhood?"

Follow that with an afternoon of there's-no-way I-can-get-all of-this-work-done in-this-lifetime amounts of work, and the end of the day could not come soon enough.

Considering last night was a wonderfully productive slice of time working at Flock, being overwhelmed today was a serious downer.

But then I realized that, eh, nah.

No need to take myself so seriously. No need for the drop into a molasses world. No need to lose sight of the fact that there's a lot of fun happening, and being blue only distracts my view of it.

So raspberries to Mike for the groupie/second childhood comment. And "pbth!" to the huge work load (it'll still get done, just not Right. Now).

I'm off to throw the disc, run with the dogs, and eat a piece of chocolate cake.

Oh, and watch tonight's episode of Ultimate Fighter 2, the revenge of the wimps.