One of the great perils of blog-dom is that it
provides a place to vent.
While on the surface this might seem like a good
thing, it also means that it's very easy for a blog to turn into a steaming pool
of green, gaseous angst. It's important to leaven a blog with some levity
- which I have not been so good at lately. There's been a lot going on,
and a lot of it's been well nigh overwhelmingly frustrating. There's been
some stress in the stately manse that I call home (errr... okay, 1950's
rambler on a corner lot does not qualify as a "stately manse" but I can dream
can't I?)
Things are not all bad in my little corner of the
world.
My job has always involved some very odd office
politics but after putting in six years I seem to be landing on the "accepted"
side of things - approved, stamped grade A, and no longer in ongoing contention
with significant numbers of other staff. In short, things are
good.
For that matter I've been at the same job for six
years and I like it. There was a brief hiatus working for a dot.com at the
end of the "bubble", but that even turned out to be a good thing. The
bubble popped but I got a raise to take my old job back.
I've got a very nice, very loyal, easy going (she
doesn't think so) wife who has a bit of a kinky adventurous side. She is
my partner in crime, my sidekick, and I am hers. From the standpoint of
Reason I would say that should be true of any guy who's ended up married,
but it seems to be far out into the left field country of "exception" rather
than the rule. And given the amount of pressure I got to "settle down"
with a couple of women who would have been very wrong, I guess I see
why... Most guys eventually cave. I'm just stubborn that
way.
And I have friends - good friends. Only one
of them lives in the same state, but I'm always glad to see the ones who don't
and they always seem genuinely glad to see me.
And for all the summer's tribulations, we have our
own house. It's our first house, and we're pretty excited about
that. It's easy to not comment on that too often because we see it as a
stepping stone. When Mel finishes her Ph.D. we're planning to move on to
more friendly pastures and hopefully a more "stately manse" like "stately
manse".
In the meantime we've got a couple of flower
gardens, a nice big deck, two big mature shade trees in the front yard, and for
all the weirdness of people in Minnesota I still think we live in a pretty nice
neighborhood. (No vandalism, etc., etc.) We have our own washer and
dryer, and our dogs get to run and play in our own fenced in yard.
And we have a cat. We never lived in an
apartment where we could do that, although we'd both wanted to. If you're
not a cat lover, it probably sounds weird to see this mentioned prominently but
if you are, you undoubtedly "get it". Al's a cool little guy.