I flew back to Pennsylvania about two weeks ago to wrap up my mom's estate.

I'm really not sure how else to put it. It's short, to the point, but nothing at all like simple.

Lyssa and I flew back on two different days: I got us set up in a hotel and tried to sleep off the jetlag because I flew out at 0700 from California. Lyssa flew out just before midnight a day later. As it turned out we both slept all day and night because we just didn't have it in us to do anything else.

We …

I don't mention it very often in this blog, but my lovely wife and partner Lyssa Heartsong has been both knitting and spinning her own yarn for the past few years. In recent weeks, she has been setting up her own Etsy store to sell her work. Right now she has some of her private stash of hand-spun yarn up for sale as well as a few jewelry pieces and more will be on the way shortly.

If you'd like to take a look at what Lyssa has for sale, here's a link to her store. She would appreciate it …

As you no doubt have observed I've been conspicuously absent for the past couple of weeks, at least since returning from a long-overdue vacation with Lyssa in lovely Portland, Oregon. Much of my time has been spent at work doing the things that bastards like me get paid to do: run and fix backups, install software, patch systems, run audits, and generally keep things chugging along smoothly for the folks who do everything else. Due to the weather in the DC metroplex taking a turn for the rainy and cold (as it's wont to do every Samhain) my commute has …

As the title of this post so subtly implies, today is Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I don't actually have a whole lot to write about right now. Lyssa and I left the DC metroplex last evening and arrived at her parents' place around 2300 EST5EDT. We got a couple of hours of sleep, enough to recuperate after the drive home. Surprisingly, the drive didn't agree very well with her injured foot. I think it had to do with the lack of elevation for her foot combined with the low temperatures (it's finally starting to get cold around here). Also, the …

The pattern of light on the wall was made by a ray of early morning sunlight that bounced off of a fishbowl (out of frame). The shape of the pattern is what caught my eye.

Lyssa and I started off our Valentine's Day by getting up far earlier than should be allowed by law on a Saturday morning to go to our local H&R Block office to finish getting our taxes done. That morning marked our second trip to get our finances straightened out in Uncle Sam's eyes. I'm sorry to say that our combined medical expenses for FY 2008 weren't enough to earn a deduction, though the repeated trips to the thrift store to get rid of stuff appear to have come in handy. There is a question these days over how many …

The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day …

On Friday the 15th I turned 30.

I know that I didn't make a big deal out of it, and that wasn't out of any shame or wanting to keep things low-key as it was I've been really busy lately and didn't have time to post about it anywhere. The company I work for has pulled me from fieldwork for at least the next couple of months after what happened in Tuscaloosa. I've been moved to another project much closer to home and I spent all day Friday in the field with my cow-orkers getting stuff set up and running …

...not Art Bell.

It's me, the Doctor, checking in after an entire weekend on the road. At this moment I've found lodgings in a quaint little hotel about forty miles into the high desert of California, which is about a two hour drive from LAX when you factor in traffic. As my cow-orker T- says, "I love LA. There are ten-lane highways and everyone's still doing fifteen miles per hour." I'm running on about four hours of sleep right now, so I'm going to try to hit the high points before I fall over unconscious.

Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday …

DC is a winter wonderland - as the title implies, the US government is on a two hour delay following an all-night ice storm that's left everything buried underneath an inch of solid ice. The beltway, from my vantage point at home, is moving at a nice clip for a change, but that's because there are so few cars on it this morning; normally it's bumper to bumper now you can actually see measurable gaps between them. As you might have guessed I'm working from home today because I can't make it to the Metro station without risking life, limb, and …