Catching up on things. Current random thoughts. Maybe I will be less depressing someday, but that would mean I would have to stop taking myself so seriously. Har.

It seems sort of weird that iBlog – the software I’m using to write this – wants me to enter a title and an abstract before actually writing the body of the entry. I’m going to have to complain about that someday. It may be totally rational but it’s totally nonsense to try to write a title and abstract before knowing what you’re going to write about. I mean, my brain just doesn’t work that way. Does yours?

As you can see by my lack of entries, there’s not been a lot of attention here lately. Not just to the blog but to the web site in general, in fact. The comments about having too much to do are still valid; the set of things has changed tremendously. The load has not. I’m starting to think that in spite of all of the things that we have cut out of our schedule that there are probably a few more that need to go, too.

I should start by saying that the Thursday vacations were well received by the kids, and I look forward to more vacation time this year. I’m thinking of actually taking an extra week off, partly to spend time with my family and partly to catch up on some annoying maintenance chores around the house. I never want to do them during the week, and the weekends always seem to be chock full of things to do (see last paragraph).

Christmas, in particular, was a glorious vacation. I left work on the afternoon of the 23rd of December and didn’t return until January 5. Of course, the next several weeks were spent catching up, and just this past week I started and finished a project that I committed to spend time on in early December. But I’m just about done with that now. Just in time, of course, to get sent to one of our other offices for a week from Feb 16-20. That will be another several weeks of catching up, I suppose, but here’s hoping I can actually use my evenings productively and get things organized while I’m down there. I hope to be able to hit the ground running when I get back.

This weekend has been a bit of cleaning and fixing things so that Michelle’s mom can (hopefully) come down to visit while I’m gone. A few 5 cent washers fixed the door latches on our bureau so that the cat can’t get in and use Michelle’s sweaters and such for a cozy bed. Nobody feels bad for the cat. Really. Also, I managed to work something out to get our HEPA filter running again. The prefilter was pretty well clogged and I had to find a replacement. Fortunately the local discount stores carry a “universal” replacement that is in fact universal enough to work with our filter, and there’s enough left over to use a second time. Woohoo! Maybe we can clean up the air enough to keep all of us breathing a little easier.

Well, baby’s crying, something about her pacifier, and I won’t get back to this as it’s nearly 2 a.m. G’night…