When I look at where I'm at today, it's impossible not to feel profoundly lucky. I'm married to a super-hip lit-craft goddess, I work for a company full of smart people I genuinely like, I enjoy the work I do (from the comfort of my home, most days), and I have cookies.

That's right. Cookies.

The trick, though, is that my work has slowly evolved from "Go to the office, code, come home" to "Wake up, work on stuff you enjoy, fall asleep." That's awesome in a lot of ways, but it also means that I've had to build new skills to keep life sane. Come evening, it's often tough to figure out how the transition from "work coding" to "play coding" happens, precisely -- let along the transition from "coding" to "family, reading, kittens, etc."  Continue reading...

Despite my promises to blog more regularly, the trip to Providence for the Lullabot Workshops knocked me off my rhythm. They were great fun, though, and it was a real pleasure to work on distilling Drupal's ins and outs for an audience of curious web developers. I got a chance to meet the rest of the 'Bots, including Angie and Ted and Nate and Liza and Robert and Jeff and Matt (in no particular order). Angie and I confirmed that we're the Doublemint Twins of the Drupal world, sufficiently geeky to pass up free drinks in favor of hacking on core.

There were other thrills, too -- one of the guys who wrote the web design classic Creating Killer Web Sites was there attending the workshop. I went a little fanboy, admitting that it had been my personal HTML bible in the heady days of the mid-90s, when spacer GIFs were cutting edge and tables were advanced page layout tools.

Getting home was really, really nice. I forget sometimes how much time Catherine and I spend hanging out together, and I missed her a lot. Abby, too, was missed though it was nice not having to sticky-brush myself free of fur every twenty minutes or so.

In other news, I obtained (wait for it, this one's worth it) A Nintendo Wii. Against all odds, a GameStop about 5 miles from home had a few in stock and I was there at the right time. Finding a second remote for it is proving to be even more difficult, but Catherine and I are quite enjoying the Tennis and Baseball and classic Zelda (on the virtual console). Nintendo knows how these things are done, friends. I popped in an SD card and realized that it had a pile of old honeymoon photos. How? The Wii popped up a nice slideshow with friendly background music and spiffy transition effects. Not only that, it displays my blog site perfectly. Hooray, Wii Internet Browser!