Huge and hearty congratulations to Mark Buehrle on his perfect game!  This sort of stuff never gets old.  And you know it's something special when it's reported in as "breaking news" in large font with yellow highlighting on the top of the CNN home page!

Also, a warm welcome to the two newest folks on my f-list, iammystery_girl and hanachan01 -- I'm really delighted to have both of you here.

I know my posts have been uncharacteristically short lately.  That's mainly because there's not much going on around here and things are pretty much status quo.  I did have a little misunderstanding with my closest coworker over who is taking time off when during the Christmas holidays (yeah, we're having to figure it out in July!), but fortunately we got it straightened out.  I'm feeling better than I was earlier in the week, and things will improve even more if I can sleep well tonight.  I had baseball boyfriends on the brain last night and thus a bit of insomnia, but I'm going to swat all those pretty thoughts firmly away tonight because I've got one more work day to get through...

That's it for now, y'all.  More brain draining medical chart work awaits.

Oh, this is one that definitely needed to be expounded upon.  Close to 20 years ago now I developed a close friendship with a guy who I played in a band with.  We were inseparable.  Everyone thought we were an item, but we weren't...we were just the dearest of friends.  Unfortunately, I developed a crush on him that only got worse with time because we were around each other so much.  I thought I caught some vibes from him a few times, but he never made any moves, and I didn't want to rock the boat, so I suffered in silence and became progressively more obsessed with him, to the point where I would get upset at his little flings or even his flirtations that occurred in conjunction with gigs or other events where we both were.  It wasn't the kind of band where there were "groupies," per se, but there were plenty of opportunities for him to meet people.  Anyway, after awhile this began to affect the band dynamics because the other band members got aggravated with me for being a basket case over every little thing that he did.  I finally couldn't take it anymore, so sat him down for a talk and spilled my guts to him, of course apologizing for the way I had been behaving.  Being the incredibly nice guy that he was (and still is), he heard me out and was very nice about it all (he of course was well aware of how I felt, as his brother also played in the band).  It turned out that when we first met, he actually had feelings for me but, as he put it, I didn't act towards him the way he would have expected me to act if I had been interested in him.  He didn't catch those vibes from me (probably because I hadn't yet been bitten by the bug at that point), so concluded that it would be cool to have a female best friend, which he had never had before.  So that's what we were.  And when he told me that, I kicked myself...then, and for a long time afterwards.  It was just a matter of mistiming.  So it goes.

I had a hard time over the whole thing for awhile, but then there came an incident where one of his flings was right in my face in close quarters for an entire weekend, and I was forced to face up to the reality of the situation.  It hurt like hell, but I came through it and amazingly enough, just a couple of months after that, we were both at an event where he met someone, a stranger to both of us.  I saw the sparks fly between them during the whole evening, and I was fine about it.  She and I ended up at the same afterparty and I teased her (gently) about talking to my bandmate, and she waxed eloquent about him, how nice he was, his beautiful blue eyes...and I told her he was one of my best friends and a wonderful person, and she should go for it.  I called my bandmate the next day and asked him how he enjoyed the event the night before, and he started stammering and stuttering about this beautiful woman who he had met.  I told him I had spoken to her and she really liked him and I thought he should ask her out.  Seven months later I sang at their wedding.  That was in 1992 and they're still happily together with a couple of kids.  So all's well that ends well.  :-)