I have been feeling as though I’ve been slacking off in posting here lately. Right at the end of last month and the beginning of this, I felt I was just getting back into a decent rhythm. That should have been a clear warning sign.
It started with what seemed like a simple request to add some memory to my laptop machine. I’m working on a fairly complex cost modeling project at the moment and the smart guy doing all the hard work decided it was time for me to have a more detailed look at his work. This is his way of making me feel as if I were adding some value to the effort, but I’m not fooled. It turns out that the memory on my old laptop was maxed out. My simple request for a memory upgrade turns into an upgrade to a new machine. Our IT guys were great, but they also know that I tweak my machines to a fair-thee-well. They did the basic upgrade, but then I ended up spending the next several days rebuilding and reorganizing my working environment. Very educational and a much needed opportunity to clean up a lot of accumulated cruft, but several days where blogging was impossible and when I did get my blogging tools restored, there were 1500 unread posts waiting for me in my aggregator.
By now it’s the weekend. Now I could start blogging or I could take these two fellows to watch the Cubs beat the Red Sox 7–6 on Saturday. It wasn’t a difficult choice:
The one with the new Mohawk is mine. The Monday after the Cubs game, I put him on the plane to skateboarding camp.
So finally, it’s off to my client and our financial model. I figure I’ll get to some blogging done in the hotel room after work. Instead I spend 5 hours in the emergency room at Mt. Auburn hospital learning about the joys of kidney stones (I had great sympathy for Dave Pollard’s experience a while back, now I empathize). The combination of drugs they put me on pretty much knocked me out for the next several days. I think we are finally back to some semblance of normal.