Thought That Came Unbidden

I must be feeling a little bit better…I’m starting to resent going to work.

During my recent illness and seemingly endless recovery (will I ever get back to normal? I have no idea), going to work became a symbol of normalcy. If I could get out of the house to go to work, function at my desk and do my job, I must be OK.

Yesterday morning I was packing my lunch and all I could think was “I wish I didn’t have to go today. I’d love to just stay home today.” In talking with The GirlFriend this morning I mentioned that what I’d really love to do is stay home. Her response: “And do what?” Which got me to thinking: what would I do if I stayed home?

We don’t have kids and I have a real problem being dependent on someone else for money, so barring winning the lottery, just being a couch potato is pretty much out of the question.

My dream job: I work from home for a web design/development firm doing nothing but taking designers’ comps, slicing them up, creating CSS and XHTML templates for web sites and testing them in various browser environments, making about $45K a year.

So, why wasn’t that on my high school aptitude test?

So…when Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock (given name: Robert Ritchie) had sex, what did she yell out? And how embarassing would it have been to scream the wrong name?

Things I think about while stuck in traffic.

I had a friend IM me the other day to ask “have you stopped blogging?” The answer is: not really.

Between fallout from my uncle’s death at the end of the year and my own troubling but not serious health-related issues at the end of January, writing, hell, thinking, hasn’t really been a priority in the past couple of months.

I’m starting to feel the need to get back to it though, but I’m also wondering if there’s any point, if my voice isn’t just more noise in a world that is already overloaded with superfluous crap.

It also makes me wonder why I write here, exactly. This blog started, as I’m sure many a blog did, as a platform for venting the ridiculousness of my job but, gradually, people (you know who you are!) have started reading me and leaving comments. So the question becomes, do I write for me, or do I write for you guys?

Something for me to think about as the weather starts to warm here and I start to wake up from too many months’ slumber.

This is the second year in a row I’ve done NaNoWriMo and then signed up for a continuing education class in some web technology. And it’s the last year I do that.

Check out my final project from javascript class…and my final javascript project period. I think now that I’m thirty<mumble> I’ve gone way too right brained for programming.

The days have been getting longer here since mid-December. I know it’s a psychological thing but something important happens at the solstice, particularly for those of us not fond of long, cold nights and short days washed by thin, anemic sunlight.

Something clicks and a weight is lifted. The light is coming back. The world is going to keep turning. Everything will be alright.

Then, February comes. February with its mere 28 days. Capricious and intemperate, gray one day, bright and cunningly warm the next. It’s enough to drive you to go to a tropical place for days at a time, hoping against hope that the mandatory inconvenient snow storm happens on the first day you’re out of town and is cleared up by the time you must subject yourself to the TSA‘s ministrations on the way home.

This shortest of months isn’t all bad, though. It is in February that if you’re really paying attention you have empirical proof that the days are getting longer. It is in late February, just after our second holiday in less than a month, that you have that first hopeful, flickering thought: maybe I don’t need to turn on the porch light this morning. Maybe, just maybe, it will still be light out when I get home.

And it is in late February that the birds start showing back up, mobbing the side yard feeder that all winter we’ve only had to fill once a week but now requires attention every other day. It is as February turns to March that we insane morning people get our bird songs back.

I can hear them even as I type, chirping, tweedling, and waking up the world, and it makes me smile.