Looking ahead

I'm currently a graphic designer at a small community newspaper. Or at least, I am a graphic designer (and assistant editor, blargh) at a newspaper when I'm not on maternity leave. I haven't actually been at my job for 11 months. I've only been on mat leave for 9 months. I had 3 months of sick leave before my mat leave started thanks to an absolutely crazy blood pressure issue (also known as pre-eclampsia, which I was never officially diagnosed with, but things were getting scary for a bit there).

Anyhoo... my point is I don't want to be a graphic designer (or editor) anymore. I like graphic design, I really do. I find design to be quite facinating and even though I have no 'formal' training (13+ years of hands-on learning and experience), I've grown to appreciate various forms of design and still find myself dissecting ads and graphic works on occasion. I used to visit Notcot.org and the CDR on a daily basis, but since I've been off work, it's more often than not that I forget about them until I've gone through every other site that I regularly visit.

So what do I plan on doing to make a living? Well, for the short term, I plan to return to my job after my mat leave and then quit after fulfilling the required amount of time I have to (it's a stupid set up - I think it's 2 weeks, but if I don't go back at all, I owe them all the 'top up' pay they paid me while I was on my leave. Stupid...). After that, I'm going to likely be working, again, at a local family restaurant that I've been working at for 11 years, off and on. I like it there, my bosses are fabulous and I'm pretty sure I can just step in and pick up where I left off (after learning about the new quirky menu).

I'm planning on attending the culinary school here next fall as well. I've already been accepted once - for this fall - but can't attend because I'm still on leave and I don't think it would work for this year. My finances aren't ready and there's the child care issue, not to mention the fact I have to go back to work in December for the aforementioned reason. So I've pushed it off until next year. The good part of this is I now know roughly how much it will cost for everything, including the non-tuition part, so I can start figuring out how I'm paying for it.

Why culinary school? Why not? I like to cook. I like to bake. I've been cooking since I was a little kid - I used to make denvers for breakfast when I was 7 or 8, using the plug-in frying pan. I've been baking since I was in Brownies. I'm addicted to the Food Network. It's kind of like gardening - you know you're accomplishing something. Everyone needs to eat, so why not provide that service for them?

And there's the point that, upon graduation, I should - in theory - make more than I do/did at the restaurant. However, my plans for after graduation may not bring in much more than I make/made when I do work at the restaurant.

I don't want to work in a restaurant ever again after graduation. I would much rather be on my own, catering or doing specialty cooking. I don't want to get bogged down working for someone else and their ideas. Essentially, I'm going to school to learn more about cooking than trying to get a better position at the local steakhouse or a ski resort (which is where a good chunk of the grads from this program end up).

I have a couple of ideas. I want to be an almost-boutique dainty-maker. I want to be able to provide my services to people who can't (or are afraid to) cook for their loved ones for special occasions. I have no idea how to get to either of these points, even upon graduation, but give me enough time, and I'll have researched both ideas to death. And hopefully come up with a game plan.

I guess in the end, I'll still be doing a bit of design, even if it is with food. Stick with what you know, I guess ;)

This is what I have to look forward to?

I don't think 10 year old boys are supposed to mock their moms in public.

Heck, I'm 32 and I'm not allowed to mock my mom in public without risking a quick whack with her purse.

Eep.

Also, playing with rakes? As swords? Yeah, no.

And this is a prime example of why discipline is a good thing. It makes me wonder what parents who refuse to discipline (and I don't mean beat - I mean discipline, actual lesson learning) think when they let their kids do whatever they damn well please and then have consequences like hospital visits or the cops showing up, holding little Tommy or Susy by the collar. It boggles the mind.

But to each their own, apparently. Perhaps one day our daughter will be a well-educated lawyer, prosecuting these little hellions. One can dream :)

Perpetually digging dirt from under my nails

I've always been a fan of gardening. I haven't had the chance to seriously garden for quite a few years - the last time I had the room to plant anything substantial was when I lived with my sister and her now-husband 4 or 5 years ago. Even then, it wasn't anything scientific or dramatic - I tend to think more practically when planning a garden. I'm not a frou-frou flower type; I like my veggies. There's actual progress when you plant vegetable seeds and raise them to maturity. With flowers, they grow, they bloom, they die.

We moved into our current house last summer, at about this time of year. When we looked at the house, there was almost nothing in the gardens. More weeds than actual flowers, the rose bushes had been left to their own devices, just general mayhem. I knew I had my work cut out for me this spring when the snow melted (finally... it was late April before it was all gone) - I wanted a vegetable garden, a flower garden, and to get the 4 or 5 rose bushes we had under control.

Like I said, I'm not entirely scientific about gardening. Heck, I'm barely competent. I know that you should always plant vegetables you eat together, together. So I did. I also had to keep in mind where the best sun was, and once we cut down a tree infested with mountain pine beetle, we had a lot of newly available sun. The vegetable garden runs east-west, about 45 feet in length, 6 feet wide. Before I even started planting anything, I had to weed and move and destroy what the previous owners had left for us. I ended up leaving a rose bush, a Bachelor's Button plant (that'd be the one up above, with the bee) and a Sedum plant. The latter two I plan on moving in the fall once everything starts dying off. But the weeding. God, the weeding. And the overabundance of crabapple tree sprouts threatening to take over my garden from our neighbours' yard. Grr.

So I started my year digging up old plants - including many, many, many lilies, tulips and daisies - and transplanting many of them to our perennial garden. Well, our current perennial garden - I have grand plans for this fall and next summer, but I'll get to that in a second. I had no idea what a lot of the plants were that I was dealing with and still don't, to be honest. I have 5 different varieties of ferns in the perennial garden. I just water everything equally and keep an eye on anything I'm unfamiliar with and try to figure out what to do if they start dying. Books and the internet (and the local horticultrual line run by the local university) are wonderful things.

I had no great intentions for my vegetable garden this year. I knew that there was a veggie garden planted previously - row stakes for spinach and carrots were still in the garden - but I knew it'd be a challenge to actually grow anything in my garden because of the random crabapple tree shoots, wall o'daisies and the 'is it a weed or a flower?' game. But I managed to get a fair bit planted, including:
-zucchini
-tomatoes
-2 kinds of cherry tomatoes
-green peppers
-yellow onions
-green bush beans
-yellow bush beans
-peas
And then there's the carrots, lettuce and radishes.

I decided to try something different this year with the carrots, lettuce and radishes. Because of the tree sprouts, I lost a fair bit - about a quarter - of useable land for my garden. So I planted the carrots, lettuce and radishes in containers. With little to no success. I starved the first batch of carrots and lettuce I planted; one of the first batches of radishes were growing fine and then started to drown. The other batch just didn't grow at all. Lesson learned - don't do this again. The cherry tomatoes, on the other hand... oh, sweet success.

I had tried growing cherry tomatoes directly in the ground before. No luck. So I tried them in containers - 3 plants to each 3-foot long container. I chose 2 different varieties this year as I had in the past and oh, wow... I don't know if they're officially cross-breeding, but the amount of fruit (and it is a fruit) they two plants have been producing is more than impressive. The two plants I have this year aren't nearly as high as the ones I grew in the first year I tried this - this year, they're maybe 4 feet high; first time, almost 7 feet. But the summer is not over... yet. As I've done with all my flowering veggies (which seems to be most of them), I've tried to keep some flowers in the general area for what pollination I can get. But this year's been slow for bees and other pollinating insects... and then there's the zucchini.

My poor zucchini. I've never grown zucchini before, but I did successfully grow pumpkins 13 years ago. And zucchini is perfect for baby food. And chocolate zucchini cake... mmm. So I started the zucchini in the house in late March so it would be ready for planting in May (or June, as was the case this year). Everything looked okay; some of the plants were a little weaker looking than others, but they all survived. They started flowering and perking up and growing... and then there were no little zucchinis anywhere. I tried to figure out what was wrong and the only thing I've been able to come up with is I have a whole bunch of male plants. No female plants at all. None. So this morning, in an act of desperation, I went out, armed with a dozen Q-tips, and pollinated my zucchini. We'll see if anything comes of my very desperate attempt to salvage my zucchini in a few weeks.

As for everything else, I have a couple of peppers, some peas (yay!), half a dozen tomatoes (beef steak) and close to a dozen yellow onions. The beans are still flowering, and if they're anything like the peas, they will be sprouting in the next few days and I'll be surprised when I see how big they've gotten. I'm hoping for a moderate harvest this year and if the weather cooperates - 10 days from now, the forecast high is 37C... crap - I should be able to use a fair bit of it for food for my daughter. And then I'll step back and figure out what to do next year to make the garden even better. We also plan on having the garden roto-tilled to try to take care of the tree shoot issue. I have no idea what else to do about them, beyond cutting the neighbour's tree down and that's not going to happen.

As for the flower gardens - the perennial strip garden in the back, the small garden on the north side, the garden under our picture window in the front of the house and the jungle on the south side - I have plans. I want to get more perennials, but have to deal with the south side jungle first. We have oodles of lilies and tulips, that while beautiful, are a bit overdone in such a small space. I plan on digging up the whole garden (14'x2' or so) and saving some of the bulbs. I'm going to try to find someone to trade bulbs with before just dumping them either in the garbage or trying to fit them into another garden.

I plan on taking up the lawn that's on that side of the house as well. We have a row of lilacs and caraganas between the lawn and the sidewalk that
provide some shade, but not a lot, depending on the day... and there's also a dogwood and an overwhelming vine at the west end of that stretch, too. I've been doing a bit of light research into English gardens to see if I could possibly do something like that in that space (14'x6-7'). But no final plans yet, outside of 'must remove everything there now'. I want something soothing and approachable, not something that is so overwhelming and frightening that no one wants to approach it.

We - or at least I, as this is my grand plan - are going to make some stepping stones, including one for our daughter along the same lines as those plaster casts parents do of their children's hands at a young age. I want to encourage her to get interested in gardening at an early age and totally plan on letting her have a small garden when she expresses interest. She's only 7 months old, so I'm pretty sure I've got a couple of years. We also have our rain barrell on that side of the house, too, which my dad wants to move in order to take advantage of both downspouts on the south side of the house. Rain barrels? Best ideas, ever.

But we plan on staying in this house for a bit so we've got some time to get everything done. There's also the vine we want to train in the patio. And the rose bushes I have to rescue and possibly move. And the potential hedge that will double as a fence in the front yard. And how I'm going to keep my lavender from being overrun by thistles. Sigh. I find gardening quite therapeutic, but also quite painful as I'm stupid and always forget to bend with my knees, so I end up paying for half an hour of gardening for a week. But it's nice to know that in the end, you grew something. Even if it's just a simple little flower, you still grew it. Makes one feel slightly omnipotent, really :)

My camera's a Nikon CoolPix P80.

Streamlining

I tend to procrastinate about almost everything in my life, with the exception of my daughter, who won't let me procrastinate when it comes to her. And as such, I'm already falling into a nasty rut with this particular blog in terms of frequency of posting. As in, I'm not that frequent about it.

I spend a fair amount of 'free time' online. That'd be time where I'm not feeding, playing with or just hanging out with my daughter. My time online is spent checking the same sites over and over and over again, usually a couple of times - each - in 10 or 15 minutes. Shockingly, things rarely change when I'm away from those sites, even for a few moments.

So, I am, right now, going to attempt to post here, on this blog, at least once a day. Even if this place becomes a massive link dump, at least I'm doing something.

Right?

I'll try to keep things from getting to dry or mundane, but I tend to be dry and mundane in real life, so it might be a bit of a stretch.

That said, here's a lovely, wonderful site to get lost in on a Saturday afternoon.

Trimming back

For the majority of my adult life, I've been 'working poor' - barely keeping my head above the poverty line, whatever that may be. I learned a hard lesson when I was 22 - you can't run from your debts. Especially when your parents co-sign for the loans.

And now with a house and a 6-month old baby and absolutely no desire to return to my moderately well-paying job come December, I've been hunting down ways to make things in our life a little lighter on the pocketbook.

For me, it's hard. I have a very set income right now (thanks to EI) so what I get is pretty much already gone by the time I even get 'paid'. Ninety-five percent of my 'bills'? Personal debt. It sucks. Massively. But I do have a car and I am, in theory, building credit history. And we have the house, which is a massive step beyond renting. Especially in a city where rents have skyrocketed and it would be impossible for us to find anything with a small child that would be half-decent and pest-free.

For my partner, he's got personal debts, too - student loans. And he takes care of most of the hosuehold bills, too, because he's got the better income. Always has, and likely always will.

Even with a precarious juggling act every month when it comes to paycheques and bills, I still feel like we could be doing a lot more to cut back. Like I've mentioned before, I'm trying to cut back on the grocery bill by making our own bread (which tends to start at $2 a loaf, and that's the low-end stuff). I have a garden, which is doing okay for it's first year; most of what comes out of that garden will be used for my daughter's food - I absolutely refuse to buy pre-made baby food for her. I want to know exactly what's going into her body and it saves money. It also takes a grand total of 1 hour every couple of weeks to do up a couple of ice cube trays of fruit. But I digress... I know there are other things we can cut back on. The only question is - do we have the willpower to do it?

The local message board here has been rife with comments about the standard of living here and how people can save money. There are the obvious suggestions - walk instead of driving, get rid of your cable, don't buy name-brand products... but when you've been doing things like that for 10-15 years, it's hard to change the habits.

So the search goes on. When the time comes, I will have to go back to work. I'm hoping to keep a part-time schedule so we don't have to put our daughter into child care, because that would mean me getting a second job, leaving me no time with my family and someone else raising our child - not exactly the ideal situation. What I need to do between now and the time I do have to go back to work - that'd 4.5 months from now - is figure out how people do live on 1.5 incomes. And still enjoy life.

I think the lottery's looking mighty good right now...

Private exposure

I tend to be a creature of habit. For example, every Sunday morning, after I put my daughter down for her nap, I grab my breakfast and flip through my usual websites. Once I'm done my cereal, I go to Post Secret to read the latest secrets. I can only do this while eating toast and drinking coffee on Sunday mornings - this has been a ritual for the last two and a half years, since I lived in northern BC. (just an aside - wow, is that an awesome looking website... my city's website is crap. Looks like a 12 year old designed it.)

I've always enjoyed reading the secrets that people send in - some I can connect with, others are just so personal and heart-wrenching that I feel kind of bad for having been let into their lives for a brief few seconds. But it's an interesting experiement in social behaviours, I think. Allow people, anonymously, to say what they really, really, really need to in a forum that allows the reader to possibly connect with their secret and maybe, just maybe, their lives will improve for having said what needed to be said.

Everyone has secrets. I do. It's human nature, I think, to try to keep a small part of yourself from being exposed for everyone to see. Humans are far to judgemental for everyone to be completely honest and open all the time. It'd be incredibly tiring and frustrating to live like that - having everyone know everything about everyone else. Although, with social networking like Facebook and Twitter, how many secrets are people really keeping these days?

The Great Granola Experiment

Since we had our daughter 6+ months ago, I've been on a semi-mission, to try to get our lives pared down as much as possible without eliminating what we consider necessities (ie.cable and internet). I've learned to make bread, cinnamon buns, and homemade baby food. I try to keep 'extras' down to a minimum, but that hasn't exactly been the soaring success I had hoped it would be. But I try, and in this day and age, with the economy plodding along at the bottom of a sewer and my desire to not go back to work (at least full-time) once my mat leave is over, you have to do something to pinch pennies.

So I decided to make granola bars. From scratch. As healthily as possible.

I tend to not follow recipes, per se. I tend to use recipes more as guidelines, except when it comes to baking. Because baking is like chemistry and you don't fool with chemistry. So the 'recipe' I used today I will likely never use again, if only because I tend to avoid measuring things most of the time. Because I'm lazy.

Before someone points out that making granola bars is 'baking', I say no, it's not. I cooked more than baked, even roasted more than baked, with this recipe. The only 'baking' I did was putting the mixture on a cookie sheet. That's it.

Anyhoo, the granola bars. The 'recipe' I used was an amalgamation of this one and one from one of my mom's diabetic cookbooks. Want a healthy recipe? Use a diabetic one. Guaranteed.

Yesterday, I picked up most of the ingredients at the local bulk store. When it comes to something like this, where I only need a wee bit of this and that, I don't like to buy full sized containers - it's more than likely I won't use it in time and it'll go bad and then there's all that money down the drain. Shopping in bulk has it's downsides, too - unless you're willing to run to the scale every single time you scoop something out, it's all a crap shoot as to how much you're actually buying. And it's the bulk store -there's all those sugary goodies there, calling your name... mmm.

List o'ingredients, and like I said, they're all rough estimates:
2-3 oz raw macadamia nuts
2-3 oz raw hulled sesame seeds
24 oz rolled oats (I used the large flakes, not the small 'quick' rolled oats)
2-3 oz brown flax2-3 oz bakers red bakers bran (hard)
2 oz slivered almonds5-6 oz mini chocolate chips
6 oz orange flavoured cranberries
7-8 oz hulled raw sunflower seeds
2-3 oz wheat germ
6-7 oz blanched peanuts3/4-1 cup honey
2/3 cup brown sugar
4 tbsp margarine (although, I'm sure butter's fine, too)
splash of vanilla extract
a few shakes of cinnamon

Now, I used unsalted EVERYTHING, except the margarine. I avoid salt like the plague if I can help it. Have for over 20 years. I don't see the point in salting everything to death, but I'm going to have to get over that opinion next year when I go to culinary school.

I took all the nuts and chopped them up with my mini food processor so they were a little finer - not into a paste, but small enough that they'd blend in well with everything else. Put them into a large bowl and mixed them about a bit. Spread them onto a cookie sheet (or two) and pop them into the oven (set to 300º) for about 20 minutes to toast them. I toasted some of mine a wee bit too much, but each oven is different, each cookie sheet is different. Trial and error and all that.

In a heavy pot - and I think it has to be heavy for this, no flimsy pots for this step - melt the butter, honey, brown sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon. Bring it to a boil, but watch it - it's sugar and can burn like there's no tomorrow if you're not careful. Turn the pot down to a slow simmer (I went right down to the last setting on the dial for this) while the nuts/grains finish toasting.

In a large bowl,put your non-nut dry ingredients. For one batch, I used raisins and chocolate chips; the other was orange-flavoured cranberries. It's personal preference, really. I'm not a big fan of dried fruit, so I tend to always go with raisins or cranberries when given the choice. Take the tray of browned nuts/grains out of the oven and pour into the bowl. A warning if you use chocolate chips - they melt. I didn't mind that they melted, though. That meant that I had a lovely chocolate flavour throughout the bar, not just whenever a chip appeared. For that reason alone, I may use more chips next time.

Stir the nuts/grains and non-nut ingredients together. Pour the hot sugar mix over the nut/grain/ etc. mixture and stir well. It has to be mixed well or it's definitely not going to work. Once everything is mixed together, spread it out on a greased, foil-lined cookie sheet (grease the foil, not the cookie sheet). Take a second sheet and press down as hard as you can - this will help compress everything so you don't end up with granola bits in the end.

Put the tray into the oven (still at 300º) for 15-20 minutes, depending on how crisp you like your bar. Here's where I had my biggest problems. My bars were set on the outside of the tray, but definitely not in the middle, so I put them back in with foil around the edges, about a 2" border (again, an estimate). Kind of worked. What worked - or at least has seemed to work at this point - is putting the tray into the oven for an additional 5 minutes (after the original 18) and turning the oven off. I left them in for about 20 minutes - they weren't cooking at the same temperature, but the heat (hopefully) should be helping with the stickiness.

I've left both trays sitting on the counter to cool completely before I cut them up. I tried cutting when they were still warm and started to make a mess, so I figured if they were allowed to cool, it might work. If it doesn't, I've got granola for cereal for the next month.

Hours later, after everything has cooled:

Perhaps waiting this long to cut them wasn't the best of ideas. An hour, maybe 2 would have been ideal; 7 hours? Yeah, no.

And the 'leave them in the oven after you turn it off' plan? Again, yeah, no. Sure, it would probably work if I cut them almost immediately, not hours later. Hours later they were hard, slightly burnt... things.

So now, I've got some raisin/chocolate and orange cranberry granola bars, as well as a lot of granola that I can use on the yogurt I don't eat. I guess this is as good of an excuse as any to start eating granola. It's either that or feed the remnants to the birds.

Lessons learned:
1. I need to be more organized. That's obvious every time I cook/bake.
2. I need to use my other camera to take photos. Yikes.
3. It's hard taking photos and making stuff at the same time. I'm surprised I didn't burn myself at some point.
4. This may be one of those things I use an actual recipe for. Next time.

Can't see the street for the grass

Recently in my little burgh, there's been a great debate on whether or not it should be a by-law to force homeowners to make sure the boulevards (def. 2) in front of their homes are cut regularly. Holy hell, did that ever go over well... kind of like a tonne of bricks.

For the last few years, homeowners - for the most part - have just cut the grass between the sidewalk and the street in front of their homes just because. To not do so would just be odd, I think. Prior to this - maybe 8-10 years ago - the city actually employed people, usually students, to go along with push-mowers and cut the grass. I know this because I was one of those students. I only lasted a couple of weeks, but I vividly remember having to cut 17 blocks (both sides of the street) of grass in a day. Oh, the fun.

So the mayor of this city (and I use that term loosely) decides that because 4% (or some random small percentage) of the city's boulevards aren't being taken care of by homeowners, there should be a law telling homeowners that they MUST cut the grass. In other words, the mayor wanted to force the 96% of the homeowners in this city to do something they already do, or face a penalty. Gee, Mr. Mayor, thanks for thinking the majority of the city is a bunch of incompentent fools. Oh, what's that - this debate is far more important than anything else going on in this city? Silly us.

I don't know why he couldn't have just come out and said, "Hey, citizens. I know that it's summer and sometimes we overlook the boulevards - how about you take care of those, too?" But no. Heavy-handedness is apparently the only way to deal with things in our city. But given most of the decisions that this mayor and his council have made in the recent past, not a shock at all.

Here's how I would have handled it, if I were in charge (this will be a recurring theme, I guarantee it):

• I would have tried encouraging people to take pride in their city for a change. There are few, if any, people who actually take serious pride in our city. For the most part - and I'm included in this number - people here like to bitch. ALL THE TIME.

• I would have suggested that if I was an unemployed 15 year old with access to a lawnmower, perhaps there was a business opportunity for a bit of extra cash for the summer (or for a future car). Why don't 15 year olds have lawnmowing businesses anymore?

• I would have come up with a completely new plan for dealing with this, which would incorporate Communities In Bloom. Our city (or at least, the Parks Dept.) is so hung up on this competition every year, that they put out view-impeding flower pots on the main streets. Why not take that idea - 'prettying up' the city, for lack of a better term - and work with the local greenhouses and offer citizens a grab bag of flowers, wild grasses, ornamental groundcovers for something like $20. They could use it either in their own gardens or - and this should be the real purpose - dig up the boulevard in front of their homes and replace all that grass with plants.

All he had to do was suggest that people take care of the boulevards, not be all totalitarian with this request. But, no. Yet another thing that's wrong with this city.

On the flipside to this whole 'must cut grass' story, Windsor, Ontario is going into it's 15th week of a city employee's strike. Because there's been no organized grass cutting of city property, wild grasses and flowers have returned, along with birds and wildlife that haven't been seen in the area for years. The biggest plus to this? The city has agreed to keep 100-200 acres of the natural landscape. I think it's an awesome idea and one that would never, ever fly in my city because 'it looks bad'. Yes, and grass shorn to within a millimeter of it's life, frying in the summer sun, is so beautiful.

Sigh.

Mmm... fakey goodness

Why is it even possible that I can buy 'fat reduced' margarine and 'salt free' margarine, but not 'fat reduced, salt free' margarine in the same container? Is there a rational explanation as to why the two can't be one, like the salt's needed to keep that oddly chemically food product cohesive, or maybe the fat replaces something when the salt is removed.

Either way, frustrating.

I spent 10 minutes being gently nudged in the margarine section at the store by little old ladies and their massive shopping carts just to buy the one 'food' that will never go bad or rot (it's true - possibly) so I can make homemade granola bars. Of all the ingredients, it's the only non-healthy one, as far as I can tell (unless you're allergic to nuts or honey, anyway, and if you are, too bad, so sad)... I ended up choosing the 'fat reduced' margarine over the 'salt free' because I don't add salt to my food to begin with. And with 2% of my daily sodium intake in 2 tbsps, I don't think adding 4 tbsps (that'd be 4% of my daily sodium intake) to a granola bar recipe that will make a couple dozen bars is going to kill me. The fats that exist in the nuts are much better for me than the ones in the margarine, so I'd rather take nut fat over margarine fat any day. Trying to be healthy and all that...

That said, photos and recipe of my first attempt at making granola bars to follow, possibly tomorrow, possibly 3 months from now - who knows.

Where were we?

After a lengthy absence, I'm back to blogging. At least at this location - I had another blog at a different address, but teh subscription to that lapsed a couple of years ago and I didn't see the ened to either move everything to this address or carry on, for that matter. And now, with what some may think is an absolute lack of time to do anything beyond necessary day-to-day duties, I've decided to start blogging again. Let's see how long this keeps up, shall we?

I'm not exactly sure who is going to be reading this - I don't know if anyone has a subscription to this blog, but I do remember several spam emails a few years ago about this blog and 'subscribers', so we'll see if they happen to pop up again. I'm sure I'll start to see people I know/have known come around sooner or later (hello Mikey!) but for now, this is probably going to be an exercise in what appears to be futility. And frankly, I don't give a rat's ass.

There's no specific theme for this blog. Off the top of my head, the only things I can forsee not discussing in my rather round-about way are nuclear physics, NASCAR and philosophy (and only because I don't understand it). But I've been wrong about thigs before and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm wrong about excluding those particular topics (imagine all 3 in one post! oooooh!).

Yeah, the place looks like shit right now. I've got a six month old baby. Suffer. There are small blocks of time during the day where I do as much as I can to keep life flowing along. Things get skipped or pushed to another day all the time. Again, suffer.

So, yeah, that's about it. I'll post random bits of this and that and see how it goes. I think this will end up being a more cathartic exercise for me than an entertaining one for you, which is good, because I haven't worked or written seriously in almost a year. I feel like that part of my brain has started to melt and if I don't do something (ie. blog), I'll go nuts. So here goes...

Gah.

Ok.

So, for few (if any) readers still getting email updates about this blog, hold on to your hats. I'm back.

But not right now. Right now, I'm busy. Heck, I'm busy all the time, but I'm defintely, legitimately busy for the next couple of hours. After that, perhaps if I find time in between washing bottles and napping, I'll pop back in and tinker about with the layout (woo! layout!) and compose a proper re-introductory post. (yes, re-introductory is not a word, but pfft.)

And so we begin again...