Daily Archives: December 30, 2002

My devoted fans send me e-mail …

Hey, el Idiota:

You’re loyal readers want to know, mi amigo, where’s this fiction you keep promising? Some of us are beginning to think you are full of la mierda. You talk big, but don’t deliver.

And how come, when you act like you’re such a big blogger, you barely blog all week? ¿Arriba qué es? No wonder Instapundit doesn’t link to you.

Thank you for your concern, Ricardo. You are, um, so kind.

Would it sound too lame if I plead “I have a life”? Like, I didn’t blog much this weekend because my wife said I’d be sleeping on the couch for the next week if I didn’t get the spare room painted. And let me tell you what a chore that was … at 9:30 last night, we decided the walls needed a second coat, so I buzzed down to Home Depot. Problem was, the only guy working the paint department at that time was a burned out hippie who was busy playing nursemaide to a husband and wife squabbling over trim colors. He gave my request for a gallon of flat “Rising Sun” scant attention, and I was too much of an el Idiota to notice, so I came home and applied a coat of semi-gloss “Sunburst,” which is just a shade darker. While Home Depot was kind enough to front me more paint and primer, I had to redo the entire room, including prime over the semi-gloss.

So, rather than blog this weekend, or write my suspect fiction (you can decide the meaning of that ambiguous phrase), I painted. Unfortunately, I wasn’t painting still lifes of mobile homes; rather, I was transforming the guest room into something civilized.

As for the rest of the week, and the rest of my life for that matter. Let me tell you about some of the irons I have in the fire.

Leaving aside the fact that it was Christmas week and I spent four days in San Diego with our families (meaning mine and my wife, not yours), I have a number of responsibilities and interests. For example, I have a full-time job that is, in fact, really a full-time job. Then I’m trying to get in better shape and lose weight (and not doing too badly at it), so I go to the gym pretty regularly. That takes up time, and believe me I would rather blog than spend 20 or 30 minutes on a treadmill. And to keep abreast of my work, I’m trying to brush up on XML, read a couple of general interest programming books and … AND … learn JAVA. Of course, I want to continue spending some time with Bukowski now and then, but he’s been feeling neglected of late. And I do like to take some time to actually read other people’s blogs regularly (check out all of the great blogs on my blog roll, including Glenn Reynolds‘). Not to mention, I’ve got Pierce‘s Blook to read.

Besides all that, there are several Web sites that I am responsible for, so I have to pay attention to those.

And when there is time, I still try to squeeze in a few hundred words on one of my short stories. I’m not making this up. I do do fiction when I can. And intend to continue to pursue those goals.

And, of course, there is always the wife. Can’t forget her, though apparently, Ricardo, you would like me to. Love needs more maintainance than a Web site, you know. I am careful about that.

And I would still like to sneak in time to study Spanish, but it never seems to work out.

And see that picture of me in the upper left? I’m holding a guitar. I dare you to ask me when the last time was that I actually touched my guitar. Go ahead. I double dog dare ya. Continue reading →