Christmas 2008 was spent working. And driving. A lot.

Now, there's a precursor to all of this that you need to be aware of: my cell phone does not make outgoing calls. I can receive them just fine, but I can't dial out. It could be that it was dropped into a lake, or took damage in some fall from an amusement park ride, or was too close to a solar flare, or I just didn't pay my bill this month. I'm sure it was one of those.

Revisionist History
This was a originally posted with a different title, and then there were comments and suddenly the world was a world of drama. So here I am, reposting it with comments turned off because that's what Vickie wants. I do this not because I want to make her happy and satisfy her every request, but because I fear what she may do when she realizes how easily she can hurt me.

It's unfortunate that because the Internet is so accessible and "open" that content must be guarded or obfuscated behind nicknames.

it's all slowed down

like the build up of a symphony or
the slow frames of a movie before
the hero's best friend dies

it stretches and tightens and screams and
no one really knows where the breaking point is

Every thought is forced and every action is muted. I have been to the top of the mountain and I have achieved what few people do - I've lived my dream, the ultimate realization of my life's goals. I woke up from the dream earlier than I'd hoped, but I did it, I lived the dream and now I don't want to dream anymore.

I'm forcing myself to write this because I just spent the past twenty minutes reading over all of my posts from 2008 (there were only a few of them) and felt I should mention what has been happening.

I don't plan on spending a lot of time on this one. Not that I don't have a lot to say, but my heart's not in it just yet.

Vickie is leaving.

She will be moving out on July 18th. I'll get to continue to watch the kids a few days a week over the summer, so they won't be gone from my life entirely, yet. By the end of summer I plan to change my schedule so that I'm available on the weekends to watch Elizabeth - in this way her custody schedule will match her brother and sister's and she'll be able to spend as much time with them as possible.

I've touched on it before, both problems actually, but here it is again: once it's been a while since I've updated it's very hard to force myself to write something. Also, I write to vent frustration, but when life is good I've got nothing to say, cause life is good. Really good. "I'm King of the World" good - which is scary of course, because the higher you climb the more you can fall, but try as I might I can't help being an optimist, so Horray for Me.

Okay, so, yeah, I've been a bit absent from the site. But really, I mean *really*, I've been busy. Lots of big things going on. I don't know if you read the last update I posted, but when we last left our intrepid Q he was leaving his post at Pomeroy for brighter fields. Well, that job lasted just about two months, didn't work out.

Sometimes the conditions are just right to trigger a memory, and sometimes the environment is just right to flat out plunge you into a trip down memory lane that's almost as detailed as an hallucination....

"An" hallucination? "A" hallucination? Hmm. "In an hour a hallucination would be an honor." I think "H" needs to get its shit together and decide if it wants to be a consonant or a vowel.

Ahem. Anyway.

My life is an open book. Or, if you're more partial to the geek parlance, my life is a publicly accessible HTML document on an open web server. There are some who'd wait around for this confirmation or that confirmation, but I'm not superstitious, I say go for all the gusto you can grab. That's why the phone calls began last night, because I'm a stubborn and self-loving individual, and I want to share my triumphs and accomplishments.