this page intentionally left blank

Whirrrrrrrrr! Zip! Zowie! My calendar may as well be a flip book animation. This is the part where I'd like to talk about things that have been going on in my life and I realize that I have no clue. Where did it go? Where was I yesterday? What did I do? Ugg. No fun. I got the M$ Office 2003 push yesterday at work. So far, it's impressively more functional than the previous versions, but that's all I have to say about it. I've been trying to get out of the free time funk recently. I tend to just want to veg out when I'm not working and that's no good. I have decided to (attempt to) get back into a regular exercise regime.... you know, the one you let fall by the wayside when you get buried in RealLife™. Yeah. So, work is a bear these days. I mean, I enjoy it... I just have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Much of that is of my own devices. I have to write these operations guidelines for a departmental project and it's all due in the middle of next month. I have a trip to the northern Minnesota wilderness and week at Networkers 2004 in New Orleans between now and the deadline. Homie best get to typing, no? I have had this lingering twinkle in the back of my mind concerning keeping up with the Joneses. I hate it. I don't do anything stereotypically per say, but I feel myself trodding in the deep trenches of Corporate America and it's just not good for the soul. Where does it end? Do you just keep your head down, plowing ahead until you drop dead? Do you live in our land of extinct corporate loyalty unsure of a shallow retirement at best? Really, is it worth it? As far as jobs go, being that we all seem to have to have one, I enjoy mine as much now as I did when I first started here... but I see no real future beyond more of the same day after day. I get paid fairly well and am in a middle of the ladder type position, but the company isn't going to sculpt me into a senior management member anytime in the next decade (as if my stomach could take the politics). I will simply continue to plod along doing a great job at whatever it is I do here and gratefully collect my salary on it's regular periodicity until whenever such time they let me go or I just keel over from repetitive stress fatigue failure. Zoink. I suppose. It doesn't really sound fulfilling, does it? The problem lies in the anchors. We all have anchors somewhere. Common ones are things like home mortgages and automobile loan notes. You can't swim away when you have anchors like that keeping you tethered to your standard of living. I mean, I could live a simpler life if it meant less of the dress coded bureaucracy of fast paces politics illuminated by the 60Hz hum of fluorescent office sticks in the ceiling. I wonder, almost daily, how those folks that have a plot of land and a modest home on the outskirts of a utilitarilly modern, but socially simple minded town where everyone serves a purpose and isn't seeped in gluttony find their way from day to day... how do they survive? The question is largely rhetorical. I just wonder how you get there from here. It doesn't seem possible with any smooth, time graduated transition. It seems like you must wake up one day with a decision and make the jump with immediate conviction, damning the consequences for another day. I don't like to function that way. It's a byproduct of maturity... I think they call it responsibility, but I'll have to look it up sometime. Heh. So, I guess this ramble is more or less to say that I want life to slow down because I'm not happy with the speed of the ride. Hmmm. You know, perhaps that's not really it at all. Maybe it's not the speed of the ride, but who is controlling it? *sigh* I'm done with my skinned knee whining for now. We can return to the regularly schedule program. I am certainly glad that I take a photo every now and then so I have some filler space on this ridiculous site when I have absolutely nothing to say. Oddly, I still get a whole bunch of visitors here, but not very many comments. I guess that's to be expected since I don't write as regularly as I used to write. I got a call this morning from a friend I haven't talked to in a while. It's always nice to catch up on correspondence. My boss is out today and I had some things to talk to him about. I'm considering working through lunch to try and get some extra time in without staying late to prevent the probability that I will be up against a deadline soon. I haven't had enough coffee today. Maybe that will help my attitude this morning.