Slacking off...

Our friends Eric and Debbie (and our little friends Patrick and Matt! :)) are here from New Jersey this week, continuing the “people from the north traveling down to Texas to get away from the cold” trend we’ve seen the last month or so. It’s funny, because to ME, it feels a little too cool right now to want to swim in mom and dad’s pool, but all the “northern” kids who’ve been here have jumped right in and spent hours and hours playing in the water. And of course when I was a kid in Buffalo, I LIVED in the pool during the summer – even though Buffalo is decidedly cooler than Austin. Even in August. I guess it just depends on what you get used to…

So my friend Eric has informed me that I’ve been quite the blog slacker lately. And he’s right – I haven’t been updating as much as I should. It’s partly because things have been busy around here, and it’s partly because of what’s been going on in our lives – the loss of the Chicago job was really difficult. Well, the loss of ANY job is difficult, but the Chicago move was something I’d been hoping for for YEARS. And when it was finally a reality, I STILL made sure I was careful about not getting too excited… because for some reason, it never quite felt like an absolute certainty. So while it would be easy for me to go on and on about how sad I am that our move to Chicago is off the table, I’m not going to bore everyone with those details…

And the other reason I’ve been slacking with the blog lately is simply this: writing can be really difficult sometimes. I mean, there are definitely days when an idea pops into my mind, and the words arrange themselves almost effortlessly – so all I have to do is sit down and start typing. But there are also days when the ideas are jumbled or nonexistent, when words have to be pulled out of hiding like Saddam Hussein from his dirty little cave in the ground. And then, of course, they have to be cleaned up, have a good hot shower, maybe a shave, don some fresh clothes – otherwise they look dazed and insane and nonsensical. And who would want to read something like that??

It also doesn’t help that my computer has been acting nutty lately – connecting and disconnecting to the internet at will, so I never know how long I’ll have to hop on and post something. Right now, for instance, it is completely disconnected, so I’m typing this in Word and will cut and paste later on. Sigh… stupid computer (what did people way-back-when DO without computers? :)).

So I’m off to figure out this computer problem (well, okay, I’ll probably ask RICK to figure out this computer problem), so I can finally post something new…