Yo, Brother, There Art Thou

So as Pete alluded to a little while ago I've been doing a pretty good impression of someone who got eaten by bears in Yosemite a couple of weeks ago. By which I mean not posting since that time. But bears didn't eat anybody on that trip at all and since then I've mostly been at a loss for personal computer time for a panoply of valid and not-valid reasons, not least of which being that I've been in a constant state of almost-but-not-quite getting around to finally sorting through the digital snapshots I took of Yosemite to upload the actually decent ones to the Internet and then totally be able to blog a couple of sentences about the epic landscape and thoroughly enjoyable car-camping experience. Since then I've had a busy and reasonably productive Memorial Day weekend, spent with the girlfriend spring-cleaning certain areas of my apartment and putting together shelving from the area Ikea, which was surprisingly not slammed by holiday shoppers; spent a lot of evenings and one weekend at my girlfriend's newish, borderline rural, as yet Internet-less apartment in the heart of the Willamette Valley's wine country; watched work commitments eat a few select evenings this week and last, in what I visualize for some reason as a sort of Cookie Monster way where my calendar gets messily broken up into large foam-core fragments but not actually swallowed; and torching a bunch of remaining, usable moments by reading Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" while trying to escape the feeling that I should be doing something more valuable from a personal management POV than pleasure reading, or alternatively by playing Tecmo Baseball on a Nintendo emulator with the sound off while talking to Kyle on the phone. Somewhere in there she and I watched the new Star Trek movie too; geeky good fun.

Did I even earn my Personal Management merit badge back in my heady Boy Scout days? Did any of us other than Pete, the resident Eagle Scout?

I'm thinking I should make more of an effort to just extemporaneously write what I'm thinking about into the blog, true to the medium, rather than trying to compose sentences and things. Which I'm decent but pretty slow at.

Anyway, this post doesn't have much of a point beyond its mere existence. My next two weeknights will be strategically interrupted by business calls to India (which, at 12.5 hours ahead from Pacific Daylight Time is more or less exactly the other side of the world, chronologically speaking) and the weekend is slated to be a computer-less one on the coast, using a free weekend at my landlord's Rockaway Beach house that I won as a door prize at last year's tenant pot luck. That is almost the only thing I have ever won. Though at work I did just win a Niketown gift certificate for climbing more flights of stairs during the month of May than anyone else who works on the 18th floor, declared as sort of a lark by a couple of the managers since my group just relocated up there from the 14th floor -- which at least is the only remotely, and I do mean really remotely, athletic thing I have ever won -- early on I decided that I should go ahead and win by a lot since it was in fact not athletic at all, but in fact could be brute-forced with time and youthfully robust lower-body joints, both of which I basically have. In fact I wound up ahead of the second-place person by something like 500 flights of steps, and I think my hamstrings are shapelier now too. Score. I like going up and down the stairs at the office anyway; it clears the head. I also won a calculator somehow at math camp when I was in second grade, which obviously is back in non-athletic territory.

And... that is all I've got for now.