I'm heading to Chicago at the end of January for the 37 Signals Workshop entitled Getting Real. I think I'm more excited about this one than I am about heading to my first SXSW conference.

I wonder if it'll be as good as Cal's was...

Eh, the best non-technical part will be seeing Dad and Jess and Jenny again. Whoo!

Well, assuming I don't convince Jess to move out to SF before then.

While on a walk with the dogs tonight, Kris and I walked past a huge house in the neighborhood where a family of six live.

"I hereby dub their extra two children, our contribution to society. There. We're done."

"How many kids do they have?"

"Four."

"They're probably Catholic."

"Indeed."

"We need to have more to dilute them!"

"Yeah, right."

"We do, we can have twenty!"

"Heh. That wouldn't wreck my body at all!"

"We could have five sets of quadruplets!"

"Uh huh."

"Think of the tax benefits!"

"That's me! A tax credit factory!"

Just finished up a project that has sucked up absolutely all of my time for the last three weeks. In those three weeks, I've managed to miss two doctor appointments, leave three parties early, skip out on dinner a dozen times, sit on my butt wiggling my fingers for over 130 hours, miss running for 14 days in a row, lose the chance to drive cross county with my high school boyfriend (and, yes, that would have been an amazing trip), and write a dozen half posts, all without finishing any of them.

Ah, but done.

Er...

Except for those six bugs still remaining.

Let's ignore those for the moment, shall we? My butt, back, shoulders, and neck are sore from last night's mega-hack fest attempt to finish this up with Mike and a new e-contact Harshal. I say "last night" but it really was "this morning." Before yesterday, I couldn't say I had ever worked an 18 hour day before. But,, well, I can say that now. As of 6:30 this morning, I have.

First thing I'm going to do now that I'm alive and back?

Laundry.

Then give the stinky dog a bath. Then wander outside and rip up the garden I haven't touched since August, and plant a winter garden. Yeah, that will be nice.

Oh, and snuggle Kris.

That'll be nicer.

"What are you laughing at?"

"Grey's Anatomy."

"Oh. The television."

"What? Did you think I was laughing at your farting?"

"Yeah."

What do you do when the muse leaves you? Worse, what do you do when you're blocked and you have to get thoughts out of your head, satisfy that fickle mistress, but to do it justice takes time? Lots and lots of time?

Easy. Spew.

In high school, when I lamenting about a particular writing assignment, my mother's husband told me the secret to writing good essays: tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em. The simple five paragraph essay. Since then, I've done pretty well with that formula. I don't always write five paragraphs, but I make an opening statement and argument, tell some story or facts, then summarize in some way.

Not happening here.

I have absolutely no intention of connecting any of these thoughts together other than to say, "This is what I was thinking at this moment."

Or rather, I'm going to spew. Spew and see if I can kick that muse in the arse.

One of my aunts died last year. Last year July. She took her own life. She committed suicide. There are so many euphemisms for the act, so many ways to avoid saying she killed herself. So many different ways not to say she was alone, and tortured, and unable to cope with life and was done.

There are people that never have those thoughts, never think of suicide, never consider it at all in life. Never. What is it with tortured souls that the thoughts come too frequently? That the strength to end it all comes all too easily?

Good lord, what is it going to take to avoid writing that post?

You are all jealous of me. I can tell this. George added me as a contact today. Whoo!

I hate linking to outside sites. Actually, that's not true. I hate linking to URLs that go away. Just plain annoys me. I'm about two days from having my mirror module working. It works like this: when I write a post with an external link, my site will go grab the page I link to - sort of a snapshot of where I'm linking to. The URL goes into a table. The cron job that runs will ping each of the URLs in the table (it actually just check that it's there with a HEAD call). If the page returns a 404, the link in the post, will adjust to the cached version instead of the external link, with a note, of course, that the page isn't around any longer, but hey, this is what it looked like.

I'll be happier, and well, that's what this blog is about.

How many people do you know has a diet of broccoli and brownies? As in half a dozen brownies and two cups of broccoli?

At least one.

I need to do work. I'll finish this later.

Yeah, and tags for this site. Been too long.

I lost most of my sense of smell a while back. I don't exactly know or when, just that I lost it. I think I lost it when the dogs showed up. Not 100% sure about the timing, though. Sometimes I worry about it. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all. It has its benefits.

"I just farted."

"You did? Um... Okay."

Or like today on the drive up to SFUC, I managed to convince Cal to carpool up with me. At some point, the car was really warm, so he took off his shoes to help him cool down. Now, maybe his feet smelled like roses, maybe they didn't. I wouldn't know, because I don't have a sense of smell any more.

But there are distinct disadvantages.

"Hey, do you smell that?"

"Smell what?"

"Ah! You're burning the oatmeal!"

"Oh, yeah! The oatmeal..."

Food tastes different, too. Not necessarily good or bad, just different.

Ultimate is strange now. I know a bunch of people, but there are so many new people that I just don't know. And, sure, that's the nature of keeping the same life for the last eight years. People grow up, move on. If you're in the same place in life, and haven't moved on, other people come in to fill the spots your previous friends have vacated.

Maybe it is time to move on, get busy doing the things that everyone else is doing.

Eh. I really don't want to do that. Ick and yuck and grody all over it.

Okay, really. Work.

And posts like this are why blogs suck.