It’s just under one week ‘til payday, and I’m flat broke. There’s precisely one penny in my bank account. I have a little bit of cash in my wallet. I’ll be making a bit of money over the weekend, which is why I’m not in a blind panic right now. Next month probably won’t go much better, as a fair chunk of my “operating” funds is already spoken for.

I started feeling woozy and nauseated late on Wednesday. I sort of bulldozed my way through work yesterday, figuring that if I just kept going strong then whatever’s wrong with me would run its course in the background. Oh, like that would happen! So today I’ve been at home, even more sick than I was yesterday, and generally not what you’d call in the best of spirits or health.

I want to be doing creative things, but I lack stamina and the ability to concentrate for very long today so I settled for doing some more digital housekeeping. DVDs have been burned and filed. A few superfluous directories (full of stuff that I once thought I’d use but I now realize that I’ll rarely think about ever again) are now deleted. There’s more work to do, but my progress is substantial.

That’s something, right?

Just so you know: I’m not dead.

I’ve been tinkering with things on my local desktop, rearranging how I run my digital life, seeing about rejuvenating certain aspects of this electronic existence I’m so very tied up in. Maybe I’m just afraid of becoming complacent, maybe I’m trying to “shake things up” to break out of the doldrums. There’s some fun in just plain puttering around for its own sake, of course.

I haven’t forgotten about the writing. I haven’t even forgotten about the music video projects. I just need to straighten out the working environment (and a few remaining loose nuts in my psyche) before I can tackle those. I very much want to make something, though, so there probably isn’t a whole lot more of this quiet, behind-the-scenes action (hidden though it may be) remaining before things start picking up around here.

Yes. Yes, I know. I know I’ve said many times already this year that I was finally ready to come off of hiatus. The difference is that at least during this break I’ve been actually doing things rather than just moping around feeling sorry for myself.

Scary, huh?

Once again I find myself trying to break a long, silent streak at this journal. If I tell you my normal weekly schedule, that might explain why I don’t have much to write about…

Weekdays, Daytime: Wake up at 5:30am so I can be at work in Hillsboro by 8:00am. Leave work at 5:00pm and approach home some time between 5:45pm and 6:30pm depending on transportation method and traffic conditions.

Monday Evening: Probably having dinner and watching anime/DVDs at Kyla’s place, going home around 9:00pm so I can get to bed early enough to (possibly) get a decent night’s sleep before the next day’s early rising.

Tuesday Evening: Probably visiting the rugrats, arriving some time between 6:30pm and 7:00pm depending on transportation method and traffic conditions. Leave their place by 8:00pm so I can go home (takes about an hour) and get to bed early enough to… blah blah blah, you get the idea.

Wednesday Evening: Probably at home doing laundry and trying to catch up on any personal stuff that’s accumulated in the previous 48 hours. Like, say, balancing the checkbook or making sure my webserver’s running okay or any number of other housekeeping tasks. Maybe watch “Mythbusters,” which means a 10:00pm bedtime at the latest.

Thursday Evening: Probably at home, this is my most variable weekday evening so I might be gaming with Kyla (at her apartment or mine, or separately) or listening to music (relaxation = good) or what-have-you. Bedtime is still around 9:30pm, give or take half an hour.

Friday Evening: More often than not I’m out to dinner with Lilith, but not always. Bedtime is… whenever. Yes, I’m pretty bad about keeping a consistent bedtime when there isn’t work the next day. When you get right down to it, I’m an Evening Person. (I stopped being a Night Person a long time ago, though. The closer it gets to midnight the greater the chance that I’m ready to be unconscious.)

Saturday: Sleeping in, followed by visiting with the kids (this is my “good” visit, the one that lasts more than an hour and isn’t preceded by a long day at the office) and probably dinner at Kyla’s place.

Sunday: Sleeping in, followed by whatever fun-and-games I can squeeze into the day, including Game Night at my place with the usual gaming crew (or as much of the crew as will show up on a given weekend). Bedtime is around 9:30pm, because after this we start the whole routine over…

With very little variation, the above description covers almost every week so far in 2007. I have a couple of hours to myself per day, maximum, to do anything that would be worth writing about… or even to do the writing itself. (I’m posting this from work during my lunch break, for what that’s worth.) I’m glad that I have people to spend time with and ways to fill many of my waking hours. My biggest complaint is that I work so far away from where I live that I lose many hours per week either commuting or working around the fact of the long commute in one way or another. Never mind the plans I simply can’t make (like, say, observing any of my kids’ extracurricular activities!) because I’d have to take half a day off from work to realize such plans.

To sum up: I haven’t written anything here because I haven’t done anything worth writing about. I don’t want to find myself, years later, going through the archives and seeing post after post during 2007 if all of them are just going to say, “Yep, did the same thing this week that I did the last few dozen weeks.”

I’m sure you don’t want to read those posts either. That’s why I haven’t written them.