Okay, I get the message already

After being awake for much of the night, listening to ominous gurgling noises and making short, quick trips to the next room, I get the message: too much code, not enough blog. Or maybe it's just a virus. Either way, I find myself lying on the sofa with the nurse cat on my feet, the laptop and an afghan on my lap, and women's Olympic curling on the tube.

"Why," you might ask, "would you waste your time watching curling?"

I might answer that it's one of those weird sports everyone makes fun of and no one understands. I might observe that I neither understood nor had any interest in hockey until after I'd taken the time to watch a few games. But the truth is that it's on because I can pretty much get up and... leave the room at a moment's notice and not really worry that I'm going to miss something important.

Long time gone

I see from a few of the comments that a few of you might be feeling abandoned. I've been checking in on you daily, but here's the thing: when I'm in full-on code troll mode, my head gets so—

[gurgle]

Erm. Excuse me for a moment.

A short time later..

Dear God, let it stop. Much more of this and I'll be as dehydrated as a strip of foo jerky.

Anyway. As I was saying, my head gets so full of conditionals and loops and ways to plug security holes that the side of the brain that I blog from doesn't get many CPU cycles to use in being creative. I get so wrapped up in the puzzle of whatever I'm working on that I don't notice the strange, interesting, and/or irritating things going on around me. My often-inspiring commute or walk from the parking garage to my workplace could include exploding fuel trucks or ninja power rangers, and I probably wouldn't notice.

I did post on Valentine's Day. It was a pretty funny one, I thought; but ultimately, I decided it was perhaps a bit too adult compared to the relatively restrained tone I've established here, to date. So I canned it.

That doesn't mean I didn't smirk every time someone wished someone else a "Happy VD". There's just something about "Valentine's Day" sharing a set of monogrammed towels and washcloths with... well, you know.

And...

...in case anyone's interested, the volunteer webwork is going well. The panicked e-mails have slowed to a trickle. I've shored up some places in the code that were vulnerable to ne'er do wells with too much time and too little ethics. My employers are easily impressed, but they are impressed, and that's a good side of things to be on, every now and then.