Okay, it's been a long week.  A server migration at work complete with all the strange and quirky problems that always seem to come out of it..

Working on the Win98 restoration in the evenings.

Not getting enough done with the yard or the laundry or the paperwork or the other hundred thousand things nagging at the fringes of my brain.

So today, an old friend from SPARC plings me (Hi Lacy!).  She wants a number of yet another old friend (Hi Barb!).   Last night (or was it this morning?  I've been somewhere between half aware and half awake most of the week, it seems) I was talking with my Lady-Love about yet another friend down in Georgia (Hi Shelia!).  Which, of course, makes me think of my other friends I haven't heard from in ages (Lana, Jan - who hates poison ivy, Vladdie, M.J., Kent, Rakk, Gr8, msme, Skye, Wendl, Haggie, O&O, JC, Amber and let's never forget that Sexy Texan guy.)  I could list friends for hours and still miss someone, I'm sure.

It's nice to be so busy I don't know which way to turn.  It sure beats being bored stiff in my world.  It also takes an awful lot of effort to stay in touch with everyone.  Friends of mine stay friends for life.  I try to make an effort to keep up with them all.  Somedays I need more of an effort, but hey...

Tonight I hit my "morning" set of bookmarks.  Presumably I open them every morning.  I'm going 2 weeks back right now.  One of those is Mytherian's blog - just as I'm ramping up here, he's contemplating shutting his down.  Kinda a nice minder to me about what this means to me.

While Mom creates an account and writes her first message (Honest, "Mom" is reserved for you if you want it...), I remember this is an account of my kids childhood and the moments that are important to us and it's a way of sharing that with my friends and family who are distant.  A short cut for personal contact or just another form of squeezing in some interaction on a day-to-day basis.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep a motivation going here.  I've joked about how self-indulgent I generally consider a blog.  But some people get by just fine with a annual letter at Christmas.  Consider this your Christmas-whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it-catching-up-blog, okay?

I'll throw up a couple more pictures of the kids from the six-month hiatus this weekend.  Guaranteed.  And if you're lucky, I'll expound on the differences of French and English on the lawn mower, and lashing a fence together.  Just to ensure you that I've filled my "strange quotient."

  - Mark