It's not lifting, or reaching, or stretching. It's a certain range of motion, or a particular position, that sends the clenching pain shooting through my right arm, between the elbow and the shoulder, like a Charley horse gone rogue. What brought it on I don't know. It's a new kind of torture that I haven't experienced before. If I were a pitcher or a quarterback, I'd be asking the trainer for a cortisone shot.

Yeah, self-diagnosis. That's always a good way to go. Nobody ever went wrong heading down that path, right?

Whatever the trigger is, I'll be glad to learn how not to do it. So far, no clue. Either it's totally random and can bring the pain at any time, or it's something I don't do often enough to identify. For a while I thought it had something to do with typing, but here I am at the keyboard without a problem. Maybe it will go away. Or maybe it will get bad enough that I'll tell the doctor. It would have to be pretty, pretty bad to send me that far over the edge, though, since I have no faith that he'll either (a) take me seriously, or (2) know of a solution that works.

As my body becomes less forgiving, maybe I should be thinking of my own mortality. That thought does come and go, but it sweeps through my mind fleetingly, and I move on to more important things, like how I need to preserve what I can still do and enjoy the next day, month, and however many years. I think I can do what I need to do without rushing off to my unsympathetic doctor with every ache or pain. That doesn't keep me from complaining about it, though. Not that I really have all that much to complain about.

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Baseball: Without some really terrible umpire calls that cost the Giants at least one run and at least two outs, today's game would have ended with a 5-4 win and not gone into extra innings. There was a lot of venom in the house when the Rockies took the 5-4 lead in the top of the tenth on a home run by Troy Tulowitzki, whom local fans revile because (a) he grew up in the Bay Area, but (2) he loudly proclaims that he has always hated the Giants. But all that did was set up the most dramatic ending in the 14-year history of AT&T Park: a walk-off inside-the-park two-run homer by Angel Pagan that gave the Giants a 6-5 win. It was the first walk-off inside-the-parker for a Giant since, oh, 1931.

Soccer: Two German teams met for the European championship at Wembley Stadium in London, and it was a thriller for the ages. (This was a really good sports day, if you haven't caught the theme here yet.) It was the working class culture of Borussia Dortmund against the glitz and glamor of Bayern Munich. They played like the two best teams in Europe, doing what makes the sport so thrilling -- setting up scoring chances and defending them. The game could have turned one way or another at any given moment. It's no wonder so many Americans don't get it, because it's not a sport for the short attention span. When you invest 90 minutes into watching a game, you can't ask for a better payoff than a back-and-forth 2-1 final, this one going to Bayern, who were the favorites of the masses (but not the gamblers).

General Hospital: Who is that guy? He enlisted Heather's reluctant aid in some scheme to help Sam, whom they have both apparently wronged. (Franco? Please tell me he's not Franco.) So he breaks into Sam's apartment to steal a photo of Jason and watch a DVD. Then he sends the photo simultaneously to eight people who knew Jason and tells them to meet him at the Haunted Star at 8:00 pm. All I have to say is, the payoff better be worth the setup.