If you’ve read this blog before, you are currently rubbing your eyes, blinking twice, swishing your brains around in your skull like a cheap martini, and breathing heavily in shock. Why?

Yes, gentle reader; I have finally posted an entry.

<silence>…..*chirp*….*chirp*…..

Ok, so not the reception I anticipated. Still, I applaud you for checking up on this site and actually noticing. It warms the lower 2/3rds of the innermost cockle of my heart, the one right below the cockle that gets warm at the thought of Julia Stiles in a tight shirt.

I never promised continuity, so you get what you pay for around here, folks.

I am fucked. There’s just no better way of putting it. In the past several weeks since I abandoned the blogosphere (See, ma? I can use culturally inept colloquialisms, too!), I have been busier than a billy goat with three peckers.

(Now, isn’t that an interesting phrase? When I typed it into Google to try to find out the etymology of it, Google came back with, “Don’t you mean Easier than a billy goat with three peckers?” Uh… That fucking website is getting too damned smart for its own good.

I’ve been working my day job at CSU and my night jobs at BH and BF, per usual. The work at CSU is always steady and I spend most of my day plowing through various tickets. Binhost is always steady but never busy, but BinFone is really starting to ramp up. We’re getting a LOT of call minutes through it now and it’s pretty nice to have people use and like the service.

The biggest addition is my work with Rent-A-Coder and GetAFreelancer.com, hereafter referred to as “RAC” and “GAF”. These are websites where “auctions” for programming jobs are put online for programmers to bid on and win. If you win, you do the job. If you do it right, you get paid what you bid on it, minus a processing fee; if not, you lose the bid and reputation points.

It’s definitely not one of those things where jobs are easy to come by or are a walk in the park. Sometimes they certainly are — I’ve had a couple that were small and sweet. Most of them end up being pretty involved — no buyer on the site wants to get something for nothing, which I can easily respect, but it also means no free money. You definitely work for it.

It also means that now whenever I have free time, I am working. In some ways, this is fine, because I’m used to doing something with my spare time, usually my own “projects” that I want to do, so I might as well be doing something that actually gets me money. On the other hand, I’m always working for someone else and therefore there is constant pressure on me to get things done. In this manner, the stress I feel at work never really leaves me anymore. My back is tied pretty permanently in knots, my stomach is in shreds, and I’m horribly short on sleep. (4-5 hrs/night for about the past 2 weeks, give or take.)

Why? Well, I have my good reasons. First, we still seem to have quite a few medical bills to pay off, and more get generated all the time. Landa’s problems continue to plague her and so we spend a fair amount of cash on medical bills and so forth. We both wish for a magic pill to fix her up, that’s for sure. Other bills are always coming, of course — more taxes, more money for gas, etc. There’s always something.

And then there’s Australia, where we desperately hope to be going late Feb/early March of next year. It’s been 3.5 years since Landa’s been back home and so she’s quite overdue, has to meet two nieces/nephews that have never seen her, attend two weddings, and generally catch up. I am going to see my extended family (and my extended friends, I think they’re proper to be called) but mostly I’m just going to really, really need an unplugged vacation by then. Nothing like removing yourself 12,000 miles so they can’t call you into the office on a random whim.

But, of course, the flights over there are $1500+ each so we need money for that. Normal paychecks and so forth leave nothing left over, so the only way I have of making the extra is by working extra. I guess that’s the way it goes.

So far, I’ve tried to stay at about 3 jobs open all the time, and it’s worked out pretty well, except right now I’m trying to back off as I have a big job that will consume my time for a few weeks here; I want to do it right, so it needs to be a priority. So far, I’ve had kind, generous, and generally amiable buyers purchase my work and my code, so it’s been a fairly pleasant experience. I kind of like the whole, “Slam, Bam, Thank you, m’am” approach that these projects offer — I get in, learn a lot, construct some nice code, provide a solution, and I’m out.

In other news, we blew a wad on a brand new treadmill. We had a crappy old one that we bought from an old woman that used it to walk on, and it’s great if that’s all you want to do — walk on it. If you try to do anything more than that, it looks back at you like a pony that you’re driving onto a glass shard road. It never met a speed greater than 1.1mph and it doesn’t have any interest in any, thankyouverymuch. So we went to Sears and bought a black, shiny, 3.5HP motor’ed one that goes fast enough to create a wind. I’m thinking of mounting it at an upright angle and use it for launching skeet. The baseball teams will love this for pitching practice. We earned the money to buy it, jointly, by sweating and grunting our asses off cleaning up the garbage at the Franklin County Fair. It was Hard. Freaking. Work. and since we need to have a means of exercise that is quality and readily available, we used the money to buy the treadmill. Good for you, good for the world.

Summer seems to be marching on down the weathered path at a pace that I am, as usual, finding hard to match. The garden is teeming with plants; not necessarily plants of a desired nature, mind you, but on the whole, I think the good guys are winning. At least, the huge bowl of red grape tomatoes seems to indicate so. We have, this summer, 42 tomato plants. Yes, forty-fucking-two. This is all thanks to the little furry-assed hopping creature that decided that beans and peas and so forth were planted for his own personal use in salad creations. I attempted to pit a chunk of lead in a race against his furry hide, but the projectile apparently had other things on its mind that day and strayed from the straight-and-narrow.

The House: I’ve done some work on it, though not nearly as much as I’d like to get done or afford. So far, I’ve done painting on the east side around the door and windows; they all need another coat. I’ve started the process of stripping off the loose paint on the south side around the porch windows, but that’s going to prove to be one of those jobs that you just hate to have to get to, but know you must. Rather like cleaning the toilet with your hands or something.

Just recently we took it upon ourselves (as if we were going to take it upon anyone ELSE) and painted the upstairs staircase and hallway. This is one of the places in the house that, when we were painting before moving in, was far down on our list. By the time we got to the point of considering it for resurfacing, a paint brush, roller, or pan was about the last thing that we wanted to be near for a long, long time. So it got backburnered in a most severe fashion. It is now, thankfully, a brilliant white or mossy green and looks like a million fucking dollars. Actually, no, it looks like a painted hallway. A million dollars would be green and wrinkled, like my great-uncle Larry.

While doing the hallway, I did some patching in the kitchen where I had cut a hole and re-plastered the ceiling in the hallway. I used the remnants of some Durabond-90 that had been sitting in the garage for the past year or two. For the non-DIYer, Durabond 90 is a powder that, when mixed with water, forms drywall compound, fondly known as “mud”. It is used in patching up cracks or uneven places in plaster and drywall or to smooth over cracks and nail/screw holes in brand new sheetrock. The “90″ portion of the name indicates that it will stay pliable for ninety minutes so you can slap it around and then let it set up once you get it right. They make it in shorter time periods for those that want to move quicker, but for us less-savvy folk, it works very well.

Well, the problem with Durabond 90 that has sat in the garage for a couple years? It turns into Durabond 10, maybe 15 if you’re really, really lucky. I didn’t find this out until I had mixed up a big batch and hauled it upstairs where I proceeded to work on cleaning up the workspace before applying it. But the time I was ready to go, I could lift my scraper out of the mixture. I ended up half-chipping that batch out of the bucket and fixing up another batch, this time with some foreknowledge and I used it right away. A similar thing happened to it, but I was prepared and was largely done by then. So, let this be a lesson to you: the shit has an expiration date. Who woulda thunk?

I put up a gutter over the side door, but I need to really get fascia boards and metal before doing any more on the house, as it’s missing all of it. The gutter went well; took me longer than I would have liked, but considering that I was taking my time, did pretty well. I got the opportunity to prance about on top of my roof for a short while and inspect it, something I’ve never done before. It actually looks really, really good. It was supposed to have been done in 2002 and it certainly does look new. The shingles are a nice pattern and are all laying well. The chimney, however, is about the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve been on a lot of roofs before. The brickwork is great and the cap is pretty decent (although I need to squirt a bit of blackjack around on it). I’m glad; those things are a bitch if they’re not in good shape.

We have an upcoming gathering for The Forever Beyond, my talker. This is our eighth real-life “Get ToGether” or “GTG”. I started these back in the days when I wanted to try to hang out with some people I always see online, and it’s become a yearly event and we have a good old time with it. It’s come up fast this year but should still be a fun event. Much planning and cleaning has to commence before that happens, however.

I just got done reading The SAS Survival Guide by some chap or another who used to be in the SAS (UK Green Beret equivalent) for some umpteen years. It’s a very thorough survival guide for any climate/area in the world. It covers knots, camping, signals, hunting, cooking, eating, etc. and is very practical and useful in that respect. I learned some very useful general knowledge things and some fairly bizarre points, too. For instance, did you know that the recommended way to kill an octopus is to shove your hand down its throat, grab its insides, and pull the octopus INSIDE OUT??? Seriously. The author suggests you start small and work your way up.

Being that I’m actually in bed before midnight and my jaw is about to split my head in two with yawns, I’m going to retire this train of thought for now. I promise to try to keep up on the writing and hope all of you are doing well.