What Happened?
I used to post to my blog several time a week and occasionally daily. So what happened? What happened is my job has eaten my lunchtime! I used to surf around to read the news and visit a few sites to gain some fodder for my amusement. But my responsibilities at work have grown to a point that I often work while I eat my lunch. Thus my casual surfing time has dwindle greatly and my in turn, my ability to spin new content here has been hampered.
So what have I been doing? I've basically quit riding my bike since August with the exception of a couple of rides. This again is a work related casualty as every couple of weeks I have to pull an all-nighter which throws my whole schedule off. Additionally I often work late now and need to make up family time so I stay up later and don't get up in the morning as I should.
I've recently started getting up early again, but only stretching and lifting some weights. I'm feeling like a big slug these days and I'm starting to have some pretty serious lower back problems…worse than I have ever had. I know getting back into shape will help, so now I have to make it happen. I still hope to go back to riding outside this season as I've lost a lot of some of the best weather ever for this time of year.
I have managed to get a few odd jobs done around the house including the final coat of polyurethane on the kitchen trim. This has been a job on hold for the past two years because it's a hassle and my wife doesn't like the fumes. But with her and the kids out of town for a few days I pounded it out in a very, very long weekend of work. But it was worth it because now the kitchen is finally complete and it looks great!
I've spent some time with my parents who came to visit for several days a couple of weeks ago on their way up to Maine. They just passed back through this past weekend and headed back for Illinois this morning. We loaded them and the kids up and went out to the pumpkin farm Saturday, but only came back with apples. They hadn't started hayrides out to pick your own yet so we will possibly be returning in a couple of weeks.
I've been working on the next release of PolarBlog (Homing Pigeon) which is the release which will finally allow posting to PB via email. Alan can now start warming up to do his happy dance. ;) I've done a major overhaul of the Installer/Updater Utility that should make things easier for both user and me. I discovered a bug in the recent RSS generator changes I made so a fix for that will be in this release. And I had a request this morning to add some additional CSS to control the comment page which should also be in this release. I'm hopeful to get this all wrapped up this month.
And as you've probably guessed, I've been working a lot! And although it probably sounds like I'm complaining about it above, that's not the case. This is the best job I've ever had and I very much look forward to going to work everyday. One of the benefits was that I got to go to php|works in Toronto. Not just me, but also seven of my coworkers as well. Only three days, but jam packed with lots of useful leaning.
So there you have it —what happened. And it's likely to stay this way for the foreseeable future. So get used to seeing more of my (lame) writing and quick Snapshot posts.