It’s been unfortunately long, I have to admit. A lot has happened, and even more hasn’t, so I won’t complain very much. I hope you won’t either. To that end, I’ve been sitting with my arms deep in hacked WordPress installs, partially due to old and outdated themes and now-defunct plugins that I allowed to stay active and installed when I should have deactivated them a long time ago. Part of me had hoped to go ahead and try some new themes on my blogs this weekend, but another part of me knows full well that I have a hell of a time deciding what themes to apply to what blogs, and then have little desire for all of the back-end changes I’ll have to make to header images and embedded videos to make the posts look good once the changes have been made. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but could never really muster the effort to. Maybe eventually. I really just haven’t seen any WordPress themes lately that spark my fancy enough to really want to implement them. If anyone has suggestions though, I’d love to hear them.

I will say this though, Lifehacker has my hands full, so much so that I’ve been neglecting my other sites. I do hope to turn that around a bit soon though. After all, I come across tons of great articles and stories every day that aren’t a good fit for Lifehacker, but they’re still great stories. I’m glad to have somewhere else to share them, and I’m not ready to just give that up yet.

In any event, things have been settling down and stabilizing a bit in the past few months. I really wish I could take a vacation, and I suppose I really could, but not without a pretty significant bit of preparation–enough that I’d have to plan pretty carefully. Carefully enough that I haven’t bothered putting it in just yet. I’m in a weird place where I have a lot of things that I really want to do–have been meaning to do–but just not enough hours in the day. I should probably make a better, more comprehensive list of the things I want to do. For some reason, I can’t tell if I’m just too busy, low on willpower or energy, or just need to muster up the drive to get started. Either way, I should probably figure it out.

It’s not as though I haven’t been up to a lot. This weekend brought me my brand new iPad-the first one I’ve owned, and a worthwhile purchase, I think. Now I just need to load it up with some apps that are worth having. I have a bunch I tested a while back, but now that I actually have one, finding a good case and a few worthwhile apps is more difficult than I anticipated. I’ve set up a bit of a musical outpost over at This Is My Jam, if you guys would like to join, or are curious what I’ve been listening to these days. Aside from that, apparently I have a lot to do. I would say wish me luck, but I think I’ve played that card a time or two before.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time. Pondering how exactly I’m going to approach it, what I was going to say. It’s been a while, obviously, but that’s not the reason I’ve hesitated. Let’s get some of this stuff out of the way first, okay?

My mother’s health has been iffy for several months now, and while things were largely okay through November, she and my father made the decision to stop the chemotherapy she had been on for the past year or so because it was getting too difficult for her to move from first her chair, and then eventually from her bed. Shortly after that decision, her health began to deteriorate–not unexpected, but still–and finally on December 13th I got the call that “it could be any time now,” and that I should be there as soon as possible. My mother greeted me when I arrived later that evening, we sat together and talked for a while, and eventually she fell asleep. From there she hung on, in and out of coherent consciousness, until Friday the 16th, when she heaved one last sigh of relief and passed away, out of this world and on to the next.

Before we go too much further, it’s worth noting that I’ve never lost anyone super-close to me. I’ve heard of old friends passing away at untimely young ages, far off relatives who had died, family of friends, things like that. My mother’s funeral would be the first one I would have to sit through, and I had to sit through it up front. Her internment was, thankfully, not as dramatic as I had feared it would be, but still the first I’d ever been to.

I’ll fondly remember our Thanksgiving-one of the last times we had family surrounding us and all talked together as though there were nothing going on–in fact, even in her last days my mother would tell everyone she was “doing fine” when asked, and she her strength is something I can only hope to channel when it’s my turn to go.

All of this happening so close to Christmas would normally cast a long shadow over the holiday, and it did, but my mother wouldn’t have approved if my father and I sat around feeling sad and sorry for our loss. We miss her, we miss her terribly, but my mother wasn’t one to have anyone mourn her. “If you didn’t cry for me in life, don’t cry for me in death,” she said.

So we did have Christmas–Raevyn and I visited my father for the long weekend, traded gifts, made a delicious Christmas dinner. In fact, it was the first Christmas dinner I’d ever had to cook inside and out. We started the afternoon with curried crab dip and steamed shrimp, and moved on to prep dinner. We roasted a fat, seven pound chicken, made sweet potatoes, sauteed squash, made kale, and sipped wine, and it was lovely. Obviously the table was short a person, but it was a beautiful evening regardless. My extended family, all of whom had come from miles around to attend my mother’s funeral, went out of their way to give us a few gifts here and there to make sure we had a Christmas, and they were all lovely.

When Raevyn and I returned home, on Monday evening, we had our own Christmas, and suffice to say that we went ahead and spoiled each other, partially because we had to do all of our shopping after my mother passed away, getting deliveries to the apartment the week before Christmas, when Raevyn had to go back to work and I had to attend to funeral and internment arrangements. All of the gifts are unwrapped and the wrapping paper is tossed away, and our home is full of books, anime DVDs, Portal 2 related gear, cable management tools, and a new coffee mug that looks a lot like the ones used for sipping Raktajino on Deep Space Nine, among other awesome gifts.

Frankly, I’ve been so busy these past few weeks and so drained otherwise that I haven’t had time to post pictures of any of it – or any of the other photos I’ve taken since I got my shiny new Sony NEX-5N a while back. The photos are on the SD card, I just haven’t plugged the camera–or the SD card–into my computer to have them copied. I think part of it is that I use a Mac to write every day, and at the end of the day I switch over to my Windows PC for browsing and gaming, so I’m stuck trying to figure out which system (and which app on that system) would be best for managing my photos. I’ve usually gone for just a folder system I keep organized myself in Windows, but I’ve been pondering giving up and letting Picasa manage my photos in Windows (since it’s already installed) or iPhoto manage them on the Mac. We’ll see. Either way, I’d love to get them up at my Flickr account sometime soon.

All of that aside, the holidays treated me well, all things considered, I’m thankful to the team at Lifehacker for keeping an eye out for me while I was running around dealing with issues that kept me from the keyboard, and even more thankful for the love and support from Raevyn and the friends I’ve been able to talk to about this up to this point. I know as soon as I post this there’ll be more of you, and I’m grateful for you as well.

For now though, I have plenty of work to get back into, a new year to look forward to, and a lot to do even between now and the beginning of the new year. I have some freshening up to do, both virtually and in my physical space, and I’ll need all of the luck I can get. Here’s looking forward to 2012.

A number of things have happened recently to remind me of the time passing. Obviously one of them was my birthday yesterday, an always curious reminder of my actual age and the progression of time. Others have been the passing of Steve Jobs, which I’ve written about at The Classy Geek and Dennis Ritchie in recent weeks. Still more was the half-asleep realization that a year ago I was wistfully wishing that someday I’d be able to make my passion a full-time job. More specifically, I thought to myself: “Man, I wish I could get paid to read my favorite blogs on the internet and then write about the cool stuff that I find.”

Yeah. How about that? Pretty incredible how that turned out.

That said, it’s not like it’s easy work – I have to keep reminding myself that sometimes doing the things that you love is often very difficult work to do: it’s hard, but if I had to trade it for getting up in the morning and putting on business casual clothes and heading off in my car for a long drive to an office I didn’t want to go to every day, I don’t think I could. I’m pretty happy doing what I do now, and frankly, I’d like to keep it up as long as possible.

That said, my birthday itself was lovely, as was the weekend prior, and hopefully as will be this week and the weekend coming up. At the same time, I do have a tendency to get a little melancholy on my birthday, and wonder whether or not I’m spending the time as well as I possibly can. Every year, my birthday winds up making me wonder whether I am where I want to be, whether I’m spending my time the way I want to be. In fact, as I was drifting off to sleep, I asked Raevyn whether or not she thought I was making the best use of my limited time: reaching for my dreams and living the life I want to live in my head.

After all, I’ve come a long way in a short period of time. I’m living in the city like I’ve always wanted to, I’m writing about technology and lifestyle like I’ve always wanted to, I’m pretty much exactly the person I’ve always wanted to be, with some caveats, of course.

And of course, as with any caveat, I summarily obsess over whether or not I’m making enough rapid progress towards addressing those caveats. Am I working out fast enough? Am I eating right? I need to make more time to exercise, and get out of the house and try new restaurants. I need to clean up my budget and tweak my finances. I need to unpack the apartment. It goes on and on and on. Part of me knows full well that list will never expire, I’ll never be able to exhaust it, but that knowledge doesn’t minimize my need to try. It’s a strength and a weakness, I suppose.

To that point though, I’m desperately on the lookout for a new and better productivity system. I love ReQall, but it’s often too difficult to get tasks in and out of the tool, and I get the distinct feeling that the service is on life support because the developers and support staff have been impressively quiet with regard to new features, updates and improvements, and even questions from users on their own support forums. It might be time to move on, and I’m definitely the kind of person who can benefit from a good task management system – I remember when I started using ReQall; I started being more productive just so I could use it. If you have suggestions, send them my way.

Heck, if you have any suggestions for getting out of a rut and getting in gear, send them my way. I’d hesitate to say I’m in a rut, specifically, but I definitely need to find a way to harness a little more energy and fire on a few more cylinders than I am. That may be saying a lot, since saying I’m busy is an understatement. Still: smarter, not harder – more rewarding, not just more – is my goal.

I’m woefully missing the catharsis here. One of the things about taking your passion and making it your day job is that sometimes you still need a break from your passion when you do it enough: which means that I need more opportunities away from a keyboard than I’d like to admit that I do. Might be time to pick up another hobby-or at least hit the gym more often. It’s not like we didn’t move into this building partially because there was one on the first floor, free to residents. Working from home should give me plenty of time to drop in for a half-hour workout, right? Right?

In the time since I’ve started working full time at Lifehacker, I’ve written more than I thought I ever would, researched more than I ever thought I would, read more horrible stories and DIY projects gone horribly wrong than I ever thought I would, and waded through more self-entitled commenters and attention-hungry PR reps than I ever thought I would. And for the most part, I love it – all of it. I may not love getting up as early as I do to make it all happen, but I wouldn’t trade it in to go back to a day job, commute to a cubicle, and slave away at work that I don’t find half as interesting.

To that end though, it’s been an emotional rollercoaster that I totally thought I was ready for – maybe with a few known weaknesses, but I thought I had shored up my mental and emotional defenses, knew where my weak points were, but this has been more challenging than I anticipated. There’s a reason I posted this video to Gears and Widgets, and if I said I didn’t have at least a moment a day where I wish I could force at least one person to watch it, I’d be lying. I know eventually I’ll get used to it or ignore it, and honestly I think that thicker skin is coming in, but I wish it didn’t take so long, or suck so much.

So in the past few weeks, I inherited an iPad for my ailing mother, who has a second-gen iPod Touch that’s just too small for the emailing and blogging that she’s trying to do with it. Oddly enough, using it for a few weeks while I got it ready to give to her made me want one pretty badly: not that it fills any essential need in my life–it really doesn’t–but boy is it a handy tool to have around.

I also finally upgraded my old OG Motorola Droid for a shiny new Droid Bionic – I’ve been sitting on an eligable upgrade for months now, and I’ve been waiting for the Bionic since CES in January, when the phone was the star of the show. The reviews have been largely positive, and while people note that Samsung is likely bringing a new phone to Verizon Wireless in October or November (the Galaxy Nexus or Nexus Prime, depending on who you’re listening to, and it’ll be the first phone to run Android 2.4 “Ice Cream Sandwich,”) I figured if I keep waiting and clinging to whatever the “next best thing” will be, I’ll always find myself waiting for the “next best thing.” All things considered, I love this thing – it didn’t take me too long to configure, and really appreciate the extra speed.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been buying too many toys lately (which I probably have,) I also picked up a Sony Nex-5N – my first camera that’s not on a phone since my old 5MP Pentax (which I donated before I moved last because it was on its last legs anyway) and the first one I’ve had with interchangeable lenses. It’s a powerhouse, and I’m still learning my way around it. Thankfully my colleague Adam Dachis has an excellent guide to the basics of photography that’s been a huge help so far.

To that end, maybe this Sunday I’ll take that camera to the market and do some shooting, if I can muster up the nerve. It takes a certain amount of fearlessness to take photos in public when no one else is: fearlessness that I don’t know if I have quite yet. I know a lot of people who post beautiful photographs on a regular basis, and I used to do it with my phone (until my poor OG Droid’s camera stopped working,) I’d love to be one of them again.

Anyway. Back to the real world. Things to do, places to go. Still struggling every day with living that life in my head. It keeps changing, which I suppose is what makes it beautiful. Here’s to the weekend, and here’s to you.

I almost don’t want to talk about how ridiculously busy and life-changing the past few months have been. For those of you in my personal circles, you’re aware of some of the things I’m keeping closer to my chest, but for those of you outside, you all likely know about my leaving “the day job,” where I was a full-time project manager for a large database marketing company and going full-time freelance as a technology writer….if you haven’t, you’re clued in.

Yes, that’s right – I ditched a tidy salary and benefits to go chasing my dream. It sounds so silly and awkward now that it’s done, but it was such a huge leap at the time, especially in the face of circumstances that I thought to myself were only going to get progressively intolerable, that I wasn’t sure whether things would pan out. That said, I knew full well that if they didn’t pan out, I could just as easily go back to what I was doing and find somewhere else to draw a check for something that I – while talented and skilled at it – wasn’t passionate about.

So I went full-time freelance, partially in order to take advantage of the additional work the fine folks at Lifehacker wanted me to do, and to ramp up my efforts over at Geek.com and the newly relaunched ExtremeTech. Less than a week after taking the plunge to go freelance, I was staring at a full-time job offer from Lifehacker. Apparently I’m doing something right, or at least I hope so.

I accepted, and at this point we’re still working out the details and mailing paperwork back and forth, but for all intents and purposes, I’m a full-time member of the Lifehacker crew. That’s where I am every morning, that’s where I spend the majority of my time writing, and if you follow any of my other sites, especially The Classy Geek or Gears and Widgets, you’ve noticed it in the lack of updates over there. I’m just getting into the swing of things and balancing out the work between Lifehacker and other places I tend to write, so I’m hoping to have it evened out and to be able to do my hobby writing as well soon.

All of this happened to coincide with Raevyn and I moving downtown to our dream apartment in DC, which while small is still large enough to serve as my home and my home office while I work, and gives us the urban lifestyle we both always wanted. I have to be up a little early for my tastes to cover the morning shift at Lifehacker, but I’m getting used to it – as long as I can make myself go to bed the night before.

Still, it’s lovely to be able to walk out of our apartment and less than a few steps to our trash chute (much closer than any dumpster I ever lived near) or downstairs a few flights and up a half-block to grab a burger at Five Guy’s or a sandwich at Subway (or a few light supplies at the corner CVS pharmacy.) We happen to live in new construction in a part of town filled with office buildings and a military base, so during the weekday there are tons of people mulling around and food trucks for delicious lunchtime eats. When the sun goes down there are concerts at the waterfront park a couple of blocks away. It’s a lovely neighborhood, and I’m very lucky to be in it.

Now, if only I had the time (or the organization) to manage to make use of our building’s lovely gym and spend some time getting back in shape. I’m sure it’ll all come in time. Right now, all of my energy has gone to keeping my head above water at Lifehacker and at the other venues I write for, and trying to relax on the weekends and get some rest in between the days.

That said, I should probably be abed. Morning comes quickly, and while I’m thrilled to even have the time to fill in the gaps here, I should probably be using to rest. Even so, I’m okay shaving off a few minutes here and there to write without having to do it for someone.

So then, how are you?

Remember when I was rambling on about how busy I’ve been recently? Yeah – this past week has probably taken the cake for being one of the most busy and challenging I’ve ever had, especially as a writer. In addition to writing for AppScout and Gearlog every day, I’ve also been posting at Geek.com every day. If that weren’t enough, I picked up a side gig over at Sound and Vision Magazine.

But here’s the clincher: I was invited to guest post all day today over at Lifehacker, which means I provided the entirety of today’s content there. I like to think I did well, but head over and check out today’s (Sunday the 17th, that is) posts! Your comments and thoughts are more than welcome, I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Now that it’s all over though, I have a little bit of time to breathe, relax, and think again about the move, which I’ve promptly ignored all week. We still have permits to get for the moving truck, move dates to set and schedule with the building, change of address forms to fill out, utilities to set up, and I’ve got an HTPC to set up so I don’t have to get cable television when we get into the new place.

So yes – it’s been so busy that a lot of the things I would normally spend this time worrying about – like the move and my day job – have gone by the wayside. I’m glad to be able to pay attention to them again – I like having a headstart on tasks, especially if they’ll only be in the next few months.

At the same time, and as much as I’ve noted that it’s been a busy and challenging week, I can also happily say that I’ve loved it all. In fact, the only thing that’s crossed my mind is wondering when I’ll be in a position to leave my day job behind and do this all of the time. I think I might be looking forward to it.

If I were to tell you I’d been busy these past several weeks, it would be such a tremendous understatement that it’d be an insult: not just to you, but to the sheer volume of activity. First of all, I didn’t really get to check out the cherry blossoms this year the way I really wanted to – not because I wasn’t in town, but just because I was entirely too busy.

Now that begs the question: why was I so horribly busy? Before I get into that, I said last time I spoke that I would get you guys the photos from the cruise that Raevyn and I went on to Cozumel, and here they are. We had a more than wonderful time, and looking back on them I’m thrilled – so thrilled that I’d still love to take another cruise.

But as to why I’ve been so busy lately: it kind of dawned on me how soon it would be before I had to move out of the apartment I’m in now. Raevyn and I immediately started looking for a place to live, and for the past two weeks we’ve been scouting neighborhoods, driving around them in the daytime and at night to see how safe we thought the neighborhoods were, and start looking at hits on Padmapper to see if we could find a cozy place to live.

Sure enough, we found one, in a beautiful high-rise tower located in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington DC. It’s a gorgeous neighborhood, and even though it’s mostly populated by offices and buildings at this point, it looks like a great part of town. It’s actually part of town where I — when I was in college — used to go clubbing, where I used to spin. Now though, the clubs are gone, the warehouses are leveled, and it’s all been replaced with shopping, restaurants, condos, and office buildings. Plus, our place is less than a block from the metro, so it’s a quick hop to anywhere in the rest of the city.

We get the keys at the end of the month, and move in slowly over the course of May, since Raevyn has to be out of her apartment by the end of the month and I have to be out the middle of the next. It’s a smaller place than we’re used to having, but I’m actually looking forward to minimizing a bit and streamlining my life to the things that I actually use, would use, and really love.

To that end though, I have a lot of organizing and packing I need to do in pretty short order. We’ll see how it all goes.

Aside from that, it’s worth noting I’ll be writing for a new outlet: you’ll be able to find my work at Geek.com! I’ve been a fan of the site for a long time now, and having the opportunity to write for them is a huge benefit, and I’m really happy about being able to contribute. I’ve been posting over there a lot lately, and you can find everything I post at my author profile there.

Speaking of author profiles, I finally found out that you can see all of the work I’ve done for PC Mag at my author’s profile there, as well.

I’ve been making a harder push to my writing as of late: I set up a twitter account @novawerks for all of the articles that I write, and post them to Twitter as they go live. It’s like an always-updating, constantly refreshing portfolio or resume of my work.

Between things at Geek, AppScout, Gearlog, PC Mag, and eventually over at ExtremeTech, when they finally re-launch (which I’m also really looking forward to!) I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve got a couple of other things I’m looking at, but trust me, those are enough to keep my busy right now. I’m really glad the Geek.com work came through. Let’s see what else is in store.

As if – between the writing, the day job, the move, and studying for my PMP exam at the end of this month – I don’t have enough going on.

Yes – those cherry blossoms? They’ll be back soon.

Last week I took a vacation. A serious, well deserved vacation – the kind where I actually unplug from the net (not that I wanted to, the nature of the trip forced me to,) spent time with the lovely Raevyns, had a great time relaxing, got some reading done, and saw some amazing sights.

Thanks to her company, every year the staff get to take a big vacation together in celebration of the company’s performance the previous year and for surviving the holiday season. So this year, they booked their employees and their families and significant others for a 4-night western Caribbean cruise, aboard the fabulous Celebrity Century, a ship awesome enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

I’ll work on getting you guys the photos soon, but the vacation itself was incredible. Sure, we had satellite television on board (I got to watch the BBC World Service! and Sky News! and Cartoon Network in Spanish!) but Internet access was so prohibitively expensive and the trip only a few days that it didn’t make sense to spend the money on it just to check email and post to Twitter. So I put my phone in airplane mode, carried it around as my camera, and didn’t think twice about it.

Now if there’s anything you should know about me, it’s that I’m not a huge fan of unplugging. My idea of vacations and relaxation tend to involve fiddling around on the Internet for leisure activities, so it was something of a culture shift for me – but it’s not one I had a problem taking to. There was enough to do on-board, enough people to hang out with, enough to drink (Raevyn sprung for the unlimited premium drink plans – which included tasty adult beverages,) and enough other things to see that I can’t say I was ever bored. Whether I was taking photos of the port of call at Cozumel, Mexico or I was relaxing on the deck just reading, I don’t think I was ever wanting for things to do.

Speaking of which, on the trip I managed to tear through Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! in about a day, and it was incredible. Virtually every tip for building communities, attracting attention to your work, and living your passion are things that I absolutely plan on doing. It may sound cheesy, but after you hear what he has to say, you won’t think twice about building your “personal brand.” I then moved on to The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman by Takuan Soho, which is a thinner book but much more of a dense and philosophical read.

So reading Crush It! got me thinking about the technologies that I currently use and whether I’m making the most of the ones available to me. I started thinking about some of my blogs that I love but that I update out of principle, not because I think they’ve beneficial to my writing, and thought about what I’d like people to focus on when they find me on the Web. I thought about ways to make my brand more focused, and put out more content at the sites that matter the most for where I’d like to go. I’ve got some work to do – I picked up a couple of new domains to keep in my back pocket, and I’m already planning a move to PicPlz instead of my moblog, moving to my Flickr account over maintaining Gallery over at PhotoWerks, and even pondering a Tumblr account for those quick-hit videos and things I want to share but don’t want to burden my friends at Twitter or Plurk with.

We’ll see – it’s a lot to do on top of everything else, but I’m pretty excited about doing it.

I’ve also got some other things on my mind that I’ll keep under wraps right now for fear of jinxing them or making the wrong move publicly, but I’ll just say that good things are afoot, no matter what.

Now then, I’ve got work to do. Someone remind me not to sleep the weekend away?

I really can’t begin to explain how busy things have been over the past few weeks. First it was guest posting at Lifehacker, which I’m so incredibly thrilled to have had the opportunity to do (and hope they ask me back again soon!) and then dealing with my apartment community and the fact that my bathroom floor (my only bathroom, mind you) had been torn up for the bulk of a week while they repaired some water damage that I discovered under the tub, and then a visit to my parents’ place, and then beginning to make plans for Otakon later in the year and then thinking about where Raevyn and I should move to downtown in DC come summertime, and I’ve had more than enough on my mind to keep me up and buzzing at all hours.

It also doesn’t hurt that Raevyn and I are going on a cruise to Mexico (sponsored by her work, thankfully – as kind of a “yay we made it through the holidays have this vacation all expenses paid) at the end of February, and yeah, I’ve got a lot on my mind.

The day job has been an incessant source of stress at the same time – and while I could wax for ages about my many disappointments about the day job and how things are going there right now, I don’t think that’s horribly interesting to anyone, even me. It’s not going to help me de-stress to write out and whinge about all of the things at the office that are irritating me. I’ll keep plugging away at it and see where things go from here.

Aside from all of this, I still have this odd feeling (that I’ve shared several times) that I could really use some time off of work and at home to recuperate and do some of the things I’ve been meaning to do, but it’s quickly getting to the point where I’m not going to have the luxury of picking and choosing a time to do things like digitize my CD collection or get rid of some of my old books and things before the weather is warm and it’s time to move. I’m thrilled about the prospect, I just know there’s lots of work to do before then to get things in order, and February is probably the last month I have to not even look at any of it if I don’t want to.

It’s kind of an energizing challenge, actually. I’m looking forward to it in a way I really can’t describe.

Of course, there is the whole matter of finding a place to live that works though – I suppose it’s time to start wistfully making a list of things that would be nice to have in a new home. Maybe after a good night’s sleep.

Oh, who am I kidding.

I need to stop waiting for the perfect opportunity and get started now. it’s easy to want to take a few days off so I could organize myself neatly and perfectly and get started on the work I want to do, but in reality no one has time for that kind of thing, so they do what they can when they can. No sense in trying to be any different.

There’s a lot to do, and if I sit around waiting for the ideal time to do it, I’ll be waiting for entirely too long, and then wind up hurrying to the point where I wish I had the time to do it right. That said, anyone have any spare boxes?

The beautiful rendition of a winter-themed Hatsune Miku is courtesy of eroji at DeviantArt, whose page I found the artwork on. It’s really pretty – and definitely fits the mood right now.

It’s been cold lately – very cold. I haven’t said too much since New Year’s because – at the risk of sounding like a blogger who’s blogging about why he hasn’t blogged – I’ve been pretty busy and under a good clip of stress and feeling the overwhelm. I’ve been writing a lot – not as much as I have in the past, but a really good amount, and some new opportunities are on the horizon that could swing either way, so I’m looking cautiously at the future hoping for the best. Regardless, I think things will turn out okay, no matter what happens.

Still, I could always use a few more gigs, and I’m hoping I find more to do. I do fear, however, that I’m rapidly coming upon a point where I’m stretching my time and sanity to its limit on both the day-job side of things and freelancing side of things. I may have to make a real decision soon about which I would rather prefer, or whether there’s a good and solid way to blend the benefits of each into a way that will make me happy but won’t drive me nuts. I keep thinking to myself that if I had the time to really focus on my writing, I could do so much more, and do so much more meaningful work….and at the same time I think if I had more passion and time (but note the passion) for the day job, I could probably rock that gig more than I already do. Right now I have things at a very interesting and unique balance. At least I have the power to choose where to go from here – or to maintain the status quo.

Along with all of this on my mind I’ve been thinking about the inevitable move downtown to DC this coming summer. These first few months will be behind me before I know it, and it’ll be very quickly time to start minimizing my things, looking for an adequate place, and making sure that we get everything we want in a home without any of the ick that we don’t want. I’m looking forward to the experience more than I can say, but it’s pretty scary at the same time. Those are the things that build character, I suppose.

Even so, it’s a new year, with new opportunities and chances to do new things differently. I’m hoping to kick off 2011 with a bunch of simple self-improvements, some of which I’ve already done – if you head over to Nova Netwerks and my professional portfolio, you can see some of my handiwork. The best part about both of them? I did the right after New Year’s. Great way to get some resolutions under my belt, eh? Pondering similar redesigns to other sites, but then again, when am I not?

Speaking of New Year’s, it was lovely – I spent the evening watching the ball drop, nibbling snacks, and sipping Prosecco with Raevyn, which is always a good time, and of course blowing up Twitter when midnight came around. Since then, it’s been enough of a mad dash – especially with the day job – that I haven’t had much time to feel the post-holiday blues. Still, the snow and freezing rain we’ve been getting on pretty much a weekly basis hasn’t done much to help things. I normally don’t say things like this, but I’m definitely ready for spring – partially because spring is about the same time I have to get ready to move.

Right after New Year’s though, I got to watch the festivities at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from all the way over here – next year I’ll definitely make it out there, but this year I figured it would be better to save some dough and make sure I’m not stretching my finances for an event that I wouldn’t have gotten a ton of extra money to go to. Still a little bummed I missed some of the events, but all in all I think I got the bulk of the cool stuff secondhand, and I wrote about a ton of it over at Gears and Widgets, so go peek if you’re curious what I thought of the show. All in all though? Tablets and smartphones – that’s all you need to know.

Now then, to take a few moments and make a little plan for myself to organize and minimize. I’m looking forward to getting back in the swing of things here.