I may end up blogging a couple of times today because I've got a lot on my mind.  I also am trying to avoid cleaning the house.  I had planned to mow today but it's been raining all morning.  The house does definitely need cleaned, and I'm justifying my break to blog by noting that the laundry and dishwashers are working on the task right now.  Anyway, there might be more blog later.  Who knows?

I'll start this one as a general update of the happenings of the past week or so.  Life has been pretty busy, but nothing terribly exciting has happened.  I started my gig at Tuscarawas and that's going pretty well even though the drive is killer.  Pedro just got back from his doctor, where he went to have his suspension fixed, and he drives like a new car.  You never know how bad things are getting until you experience the comparison.

(Sounds oddly like the mantra of my life during the past few years.  Luckily, Amy has given me that good side of the comparison).

The bad news, though, is that Pedro is badly in need of front brake pads and one brake cylinder.  Rich, the mechanic, will do the job cheaply ($200 out the door for this job is, um, excellent, as I remember helping my dad put a brake cylinder in another bug and all of the colorful language that resulted) but right this second, $200 is like $2 million.  He'll be going in for his finishing touches next week and luckily Rich will take a post-dated check.  The Ped won't know what hit him.

We also had a great deal of socializing this past week.  We were invited to dinner on consecutive nights by people at Amy's church.  Monday was pasta at Ted and Michelle's house, a couple in their 30s with four (well-behaved) kids.  Tuesday was vegan night with Kory and Amy.  Wednesday was supposed to be some sort of dinner out with other people plus Kory and Amy, but then the other people didn't show so it was dinner out with Kory and Amy.  All of these presented entertaining evenings with good and enjoyable people.  And, all of these meetings were absolutely exhausting, as being social and overcoming my tensions wears me out worse than any non-physical activity I've ever come across.

Beyond the time depletion and mental exhaustion caused by socializing, I can readily chalk up my lack of blogging to another excuse.  Much of my online time this week has been spent revamping our theshears.com website with the Mambo CMS.  Though the design is lackluster (it's nothing more than some simple modifications of the provided template), it represents an improvement in organization, design and functionality from the old beast formerly found at that location.  The designing itself is done for now because I am not creative, but I'm still working on putting the content online.  By spending my time online working on that, I've been remiss to do anything else on the web.  You can check out my work if you like, but remember that it's still very much in the beginning phases.  After I'm done getting that site updated, I'll be taking similar steps to work on my own subdomain and website, and then Amy's.  Once this migration is complete, we can update things all the time.

Part of the draw of our new website is obvious.  MySpace.com will not last forever, in fact I think that the setup is starting to walk toward the light at the end of the tunnel.  Three of my friends cancelled their accounts in the past few weeks.  It will die just like every other fad, and it has already outlasted the terribly short shelflife of most web-fads.  Eventually, I will have to migrate my blog somewhere else.  When this happens, I will undoubtedly lose readers in droves. 

But since when is blogging only about my readers?  Those who want to find me after that point will do so, and those that don't, won't.  Blogging for me is a release, and it serves to organize thoughts.  It also serves to record those thoughts so that I can go back (which I sometimes do) and figure out how I got to a certain point.  The whole MySpace.com kick has given me a readership beyond what I imagined possible and great opportunities for feedback.  I'll miss these things, but they're not the final point of my blogging.

And who knows, I may be proven totally wrong about my gut feelings here regarding this internet phenomena.  But if I'm right, I'm establishing a portal which will publish my thoughts under my name, and that's the beauty of the internet in the first place.