Le Blog

Yesterday I had about 35 unique visitors to the website, so I guess it is time to start writing again. I'm getting pulled in a lot of directions lately, so my focus has been living life and not necessarily documenting things as well as I usually do.

My production at work seems like it's down for the past couple of months, but picking up steadily. That's all I really want to say about that, but moving things into higher gear naturally takes energy away from other things--using nights and mornings to catch up on paperwork and busy work.

Additionally, our kids' bathroom is a shambles after my start at remodeling--basically I've just got it ripped apart at this point, and it is waiting for me to put it back together...not to worry, though. The only thing is that I'm the kind of person that gets weighted down with a project like that, and it starts to bug me...but I gave myself a lot of time and leeway to finish the job.

I felt kind of bad about my last post--it was a negative comment about somebody, and even though I didn't identify her, it was kind of a bad situation which I didn't fully flesh out. I even thought about taking the post down, but then I thought I should leave it since it expressed my sentiments at the time.

I mean, if I leave some of my lame haikus on my website, I guess I shouldn't remove a true story about a gossipy, meddling woman from church, right?

Visitors so far this week from: Cypress, Malaysia, India, Oklahoma, Iowa, Michigan, Dallas (of course), Portugal, Italy, Brazil, England, Georgia, New York...I think that's kind of cool.

Top search engine hit: "drumbeats"
One that I get all the time now: "Mike's Super Short Show"--some Disney thing
Favorite hit: "Napoleon Dynamite, cheese that Kip puts on..."

I've also been working on my novel and have about 50 pages written. Those of you who might remember the book I started last year--that one is on hold for now as I'm going on a new project.

Another new item for me is that I've been submitting photos to a website called Soaphoto.com.
It's sort of a contest, I guess, where you can only submit digital pictures and you get feedback and votes for pictures that people like. I've submitted a bunch of shots that I have on my photoblog, and I've been totally shocked at the photos that people like and don't like. It's very interesting. At any rate, it's kind of a club-type thing where there are "power-users" who get more votes than everyone else, and I think the idea is that you immerse yourself in the website and leave a bunch of comments so people come and vote for your photos. I can't take too much of that type of thing, but I'll probably keep submitting photos for a while until I get bored of it.

But it's kind of funny, because I think everyone is afraid to leave constructive criticism so they pretty much just give positive comments. A really funny thing for that site is that they use the word "capture" for a photograph--it makes me feel really creepy for some reason: "Hey, nice capture!", "Great capture, Mike!", "Amazing capture". Feels a little self-important, I get the mental picture of a stuffy person wearing old-timey britches and knee socks with a monacle. I also envision a guy with a big net capturing things...but maybe that's just my imagination running wild.

Still not sure about the new format, but it has grown on me somewhat--I miss my links, so I'll put them back in.

I mentally worked on an entry about living in Dallas, Texas and what it's like--I was born here and have lived in this area my whole life, but was wondering if that is interesting to anyone...seriously.

I read this book the other day that gave explanations for common nursery rhymes. It was interesting, but it had a disclaimer in the back which read, "Persons reading this as a scholarly work and expecting supporting documentation of the facts presented here are sure to be disappointed. These observations are drawn largely from my own experience..." This disclaimer drove me nuts, because it pretty much means this guy just made all this stuff up...so my Dallas post was going to take (gasp) research and effort so I didn't misspeak and embarrass myself.

And that's blog news for today--please feel free to comment. I promise I'm not going away...hopefully that's good news :).