Have you ever been so consumed by a work project that it left you little time to do much more than work, sleep, and work some more?
I just completed work with a colleague, Larry Barrett, on an article about a certain fast food giant and their dance with information technology. The article, all 5000 words or so of it, plus charts and sidebar articles and other graphical treatments, will come out mid-month; I'll link to it from here if only as a way of accounting for the past two months of my life.
Yes, I did other things. I found time for recreation, of sorts. But when you're writing all day for work, sometimes there's nothing left in the hole for you to write for yourself.
Admittedly, I did not miss blogging all that much. I found other ways to waste five minutes between phone calls, like joining in a quick pick-up war online with Castle Wolfenstein Multiplayer . (Many, many Nazis died in the course of my work on the article.) And then, for father's day, my loving wife and children introduced Jedi Outcast into the mix (a game I'll review later in some form).
I did not have time to ride my bike, or smell the flowers, or do many other idyllic things with the spare time I didn't have. Some of this was because of work; some of it was because of a wave of respiratory ailments that swept through our house in late May and early June thanks to the Toddler Infectious Disease of the Week Club. A small fraction of it was because my mother-in-law came to Baltimore to visit a doctor, and what had originally been pitched as a week-long stay turned into a month. I love my mother-in-law, and she was a great houseguest, and is welcome back here any time. But adding one more person to the mix in our little Baltimore rowhouse for a month changed a lot of the dynamics of daily life.
The time off from blogging was well-timed, actually. It was accompanied by nearly a full-month national TV news blackout; I read the papers occasionally, but was much more in tune with the time it took cars to get through a drive thru than the current body count in Iraq. I was saved the temptation of getting online and repeatedly posting the intellectual equivalent of “I told you so”. I was focused on personal survival, so the rest of the world fell away for a while; it was, oddly, refreshing in some ways.
I'll be conserving my blogging energy for a while. Partly, it's because plugging back in is somewhat disorienting, and it will take a while to catch up on where things are in the world. I have not read anyone's blog since May. Now that I have surfaced like Punxsutawney Phil. I will scan the blogosphere again, before I unplug for the July 4th weekend.
Sean M. Gallagher 