Maybe I'm going to start blogging again here. I don't know. It might be nice to have a quiet place to dilate on things a bit.

I'm trying to think of a few things to say about today and I don't really want to be specific because I don't want to admit that I think I really just spent too much time on Twitter.

things today

Things I did today:

• enjoyed and made visual jokes about a video game on major social media networks
• listened to Orefinder
• did a lot of yard work
• made an offer on a car
• watched a couple Vines
• saw a hummingbird collecting nectar from the flowers of the oleander
• spent a lot of time with the kids: I had the girls most of the early afternoon, and Bugglesworth and I went to the store in the evening
• Maybe some other things, too

Things I read today:

• Nothing.

Tomorrow will be different, I think.

Writing about not writing -- boy does that sound interesting or what

No matter how good my life gets, I will always find something to be discontented about.

Right now, I am feeling deeply constipated with all the stuff I think I should be writing, but scarcely have a moment's attention for. Poems. I have poems I want to write. A dissertation. (Or how about just a dissertation proposal even?) A novel. The next installment of a serialized adventure story I haven't even released the first installment of. Blog posts.

Tweets. Folks, if you want to see me writing, find me on Twitter. That's all the writing I do anymore.

I could actually do most of what I want to do if I got up every morning at 5 AM and wrote for an hour, then wrote half an hour on lunch breaks.

But then that would require that I actually take a lunch break. And that the baby not wake me up three times every night.

Anyway, I have a job and three children and I shouldn't complain. Just somebody please give me some drugs that make it so I don't ever need to sleep.

All of a sudden I am planning product demos and consulting documentation and doing conference calls and fine-tuning document templates and chasing leads. This is the professional life I never thought I would have or even want. But I'm just happy that unlike trying to be a teacher this life never makes me think "Here is the most important thing going on right now and someone recklessly put me in charge of it."

Actually I did have pretty much exactly that thought today while preparing a demo. But that expression of bewildered incompetence is just an approximation of a metaphor of what it means if said about being a liberal arts teacher.

It's a birth announcement!

Still reeling from the stomach bug on Saturday morning, Friday went into labor. That night we brought home a baby (7 lbs. 19 in., in case you want to know). After a couple of hours of sleep, I stumbled through the day, put the kids to bed, and succumbed dramatically to the stomach flu myself. One night of groaning, tooth-gnashing, violently emetic despair and two days of alternately enjoying my new daughter and pursuing the zombie lifestyle of stomach flu recovery later:

It's time for a beer.

Lost Causes

Never underestimate the power of misplacing something important. If you can't find that passport or paycheck, this is your chance to:

• trash out your car
• find all the other important things that have been accumulating in piles all over your house
• organize your file system

Also, remember Hunt's law:

The thing you are looking for is where it belongs, but is invisible until you have looked there x+1 times, where x is the number of times you have to look before you're absolutely sure it's not there.

Bad Index Workaround

Ever tried to study the development of a theme in a book with no index, or a bad one? Here's what I do in this situation:

1. Find the book on Google Books (this works best for books in "snippet view")
2. Search for the term in its various permutations inside the book.

Works for all the books I've tried.