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Where I've Been, Where I'm GoingYes yes, it's been a long time since my last entry. I try not to beat myself up over these things, though, and in fact I'm trying not to feel like I have to "catch up" when I go a while between entries, since then I'm even less likely to write one. (I don't entirely succeed, though, as you might guess.)
 I had the misfortune to get sick a couple of weekends ago, however. Wednesday morning I had a sore throat, and by Friday afternoon I felt worn down enough to go home early (and miss the beer bash at work!). I slept deeply Friday night, and I was ambulatory enough on Saturday to go to the art fair, but then I wore down again and was a slug for the rest of the day. Sunday I felt much better, but Debbi had caught it by then, and spent much of the afternoon sleeping. I did a number of things around the house while she was out, but we basically stayed home. I felt much better on Monday, but she stayed home that day. She feels guilty when she stays home sick unless she's really sick (I can relate to this), but sometimes it's just a good idea. One thing I did Sunday was bake a cake, because it was her birthday the week before. We went out to Amber India the night of her birthday with several of our friends, and at the art fair on Saturday I bought her a large print of a photo she'd admired for years for her birthday. And Sunday I made a chocolate cake and also a rolled leg of lamb, which turned out quite well. So despite our illnesses we had a good weekend.
I've been keeping plenty busy with work, poker, reading, baseball, and general life maintenance. Last week I had a very successful gaming week, playing Power Grid for the first time at Subrata's and winning pretty handily. In particular I had a key understanding at a crucial moment that if I played the right way and kept my yap shut that I was highly likely to win. I might have won even if I'd blabbed, but this left little doubt. So that was rewarding. And then the next night I had a very strong night of poker, which made me feel good. (My session this week was not so good, but mostly because I didn't get many good cards.) This past weekend I spent most of Sunday gardening, and got almost everything I wanted to get done, done. I turned up the soil in my planter and added a new layer of topsoil, and then I spent the rest of the time on the porch transplanting plants from last year and planting some new flowers. Several plants survived the winter somewhat to my surprise: Two snapdragons, some catnip, and several flowering plants. I transplanted the snapdragons to larger pots, trimmed the flowers, and removed the dead branches and leaves from many of them. In particular, I've been slowly-but-deliberately cutting back the two daisies that survived to encourage new growth closer to the base, and so far it seems to be working. Next time I have some weekend time I'll buy some more flowers and fill out the porch. It'll look nice! Unfortunately I forgot to put sunscreen on and got a pretty good burn across my back. Fortunately, it wasn't a severe burn and didn't do much more than itch, and it's nearly turned tan by now. Unfortunately, none of that lessens the risk of skin cancer from burning, which at my age is something I try to be more conscious of.
My plan for the near future is to concentrate on finishing some long-term projects (like scanning CD covers into iTunes) so I can turn my focus to working on more substantial things. I need to start cutting back on things that I enjoy but which aren't really central to my life or have little long-term reward. Frankly I am starting to wonder if fantasy baseball might fall into that category in a year or two, since although I enjoy it a lot, this is my 14th season playing it, it takes a lot of time, and its rewards are, well, ephemeral. This may shock some of my readers. But who knows. In a month or two I might decide I was crazy for ever thinking this way. On the other hand, I keep thinking of starting new blogs: A progressive rock blog, a comics blog, a science fiction blog, or whatever. Or working on moving this journal over to some more serious blogging software. I'm caught between wanting to have total control over my blog software and having it set up so I can both write transient little missives (personal journal entries), and substantial material of more lasting value (book/music/comic reviews, serious criticism, whatever). I think ultimately I'm going to decide that what I write is rarely so substantial that it needs that much attention, and that I just don't have the time or energy to devote to doing anything fancy. My time might be better spent to just find a good blog-hosting site to be able to post when and as I wish without putting all the maintenance work into it. Either that, or just finding a good blogging package, buying a Mac Mini, and installing it and hosting it from home on the other side of my DSL. (Or is this crazy talk?) I dunno. These are the things that occupy my mind these days. I think what I really want is to get into a multi-way blogging partnership like the folks at Boing Boing have, write about material we all think is cool, and have someone with more time and drive do the work of maintaining the blog from a technical end. The problem is, finding people whose blogging interests closely match mine is not so easy: Comic books, science fiction novels, progressive rock, and personal stuff. That's about it. I have very little interest in blogging about computer or political stuff for the most part. But finding people whose interests match mine closely is, well, a long-standing issue. I know I'm odd and unique and that's the way it goes; much of the time I just have to make my own path. Ahh, woolgathering. It's been a while since I wrote an entry like this.
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