I had decided to take out Aprils to do do Camp Nanowrimo, but as you can see, this was thwarted by my work to finish LIQUID FIRE, which spilled over into the beginning of the month. So since then, I've been racing uphill to try to get back on track … and as of a few days ago, I think I can at last say I'm almost there.
What's even more amazing is that I was able to keep up this pace even when I was out for Easter … and THEN after I caught the cruds on the flight home and ended up spending two days out sick. And it wasn't even crashed out sick, either; we had some internal deadlines at work that I needed to keep moving forward, so I spent most of my sick days working from home, sitting on the front porch bundled up in a blanket with my work laptop on my lap, trying to massage a tricky chunk of data through our pipelines while I watched surreal scenes unfold around me, like one of our elderly neighbors getting taken to the hospital.
But I've grown good writing in the margins, over lunch and at dinner, whenever I can, in the corners. (I'm writing this blogpost at dinner at a nice Irish pub right now, itself squeezed in between afternoon writing group meetings and Sunday evening prep for work). So I was able to, somehow, put in my time each day massaging that data, then still spit out the chunk of words I needed, and not kill myself, or at least not make myself any sicker than I was. And by the end of the week, we had the candidate chunk of data we wanted, I had the words I wanted, and I was out a lot of cold medicine and cough drops.
The weekend was even better for me, with a great swathes of time spent Friday late night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday lunch and early evening chasing that 2 meter exhaust port just below the main port. Allmost there … now I'm just 300 words away from begin caught up. Hopefully, I'll close that final gap late tonight. Wish me luck!
Oh yes, an excerpt:
“Dakota,” Terrance said, not turning his head towards me, eyes guiding the pointer on the screen. “When you guys go back to see this,” he said, reaching his head aside to puff at his air tube to rewind the footage, “I so want to be there.”
My heart fell. I didn’t think it was safe to take a quadriplegic into a war zone. But perhaps that was just me trying to shield him; we could work the security arrangements out. I opened my mouth to warn him of the risks, but just then, he puffed, and the video played.
“There,” Terrance said, the red crosshair of his eye tracker active again. “Watch for it!” At first I saw nothing, and grimaced as my yapping mug nattered on. I was rapidly growing tired of seeing this. Then the black form moved behind me—and in the red circle Terrance had laid out with his eye tracker … I saw the tail of my Mohawk brushed aside.
“Jesus!” I said, fear clutching my heart. “It touched me!”
Oooh … buggedy.
Now let's blow this thing and go home!
-Anthony
One of my favorite songs is 
I'd dropped my wife off at the airport, run some errands, gone to the great 
And I reflected on all the sources of false wisdom I've heard, or more charitably, advice masquerading as wisdom, useful to certain people at certain times during their development, which may not be as universally wise as it first appears.
I don't want to find ten years have got behind me without knowing it … but for me, that's led to years and years of pushing, pushing pushing. Sometimes, it's good to just stop and smell the magnolias.
To cultivate slowing down and watching time pass … and all that passes through time around you.
-the Centaur 
Readers of this blog know I'm a cat lover, and the favorite of our cats is Gabby, a loquacious gold cat that followed us home as a kitten and now is a fifteen pound fur monster.
One of his quirks is to follow you into the bathroom when you take a shower, and then to meow plaintively during the whole time you're running the water. If you peek out of the shower at him, Gabby has what can only be described as an expression of concern on his furry little face, meowing harder. When you get out of the shower, he stands up and reaches for you with his paws.
This behavior was mysterious until I had a brain flash the other day: we got Gabby when he followed us home … after two weeks of heavy rain. Clearly he'd been cared for, as he knew people very well --- but we could never find his original owners.
Then it all clicked: he lost his family in the rain … and doesn't like the sound of the shower because he's afraid he'll lose us too.
Don't worry, Gabby. We have no plans to leave you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby and me, standing in front of my wife's art.
Update: well, this isn't really an update, I'm just testing a Facebook integration feature. 
