EXCUSES: I've had a few. Here's some

Last week, Andrew Stanley joshed me that I had lost the race. ?!?!? I responded, puzzled by the suggestion by anybody that I would be in a race. Turns out, Andrew had been heroically checking Mug Shots regularly, along with another blog by somebody else he was acquainted with, to see which of us would end a near year-long embargo on posting. I lost. The other guy blogged about ten days ago.

Never one to be goaded into doing something he didn't want to do, I did NOT immediately check in here to see how long it has been. But I got caught tonight with nothing immediately calling for my attention and I peeked. It's been 348 days. Almost 50 weeks. But it seems like forever.

This year has not been a good year health-wise. And, in between visits to the medicos, I've actually carried three fairly active projects, programming-wise. But the big time killer has been my novel. It was in decent shape quarter of the way through the year before I had to part ways with my co-author and completely throw out her contributions to the book. Took a while to recover from the trauma and the fact that the laziest man on earth (c'est moi), was faced with coming up with a new approach to the basic plot, new characters to replace the co-created characters and all new dialog and setups. It's been wearing. And darn it, I liked the meeting scenes between the former two main characters.

Another issue was my lack of enthusiasm for the new TV season. Nothing jumped out and demanded I yell good or bad in some public forum. I liked some new stuff (Chuck, Pushing Daisies and later, Samantha Who?), but was disappointed in lots of things I think I was supposed to like: Bionic Woman, the pilot for The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Cane. Some returning shows slumped: Heroes, Grey's Anatomy and Friday Night Lights. Others continued to make watching TV worthwhile: 30 Rock and Numbers. But everything else seemed to flit between blah and slightly not blah. I've watched LOTS of sports.

So, that's why you've heard little from me in the 50 weeks less two days since I last took up space on Google's file servers. Won't make any promises about how soon it will happen again. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe November 28, 2008.

Probably somewhere in between.