Breathless

It's 3am, a close August night and I'm up because I ate too much spicy pizza and beer before bed.

The Peeper is sleeping on the couch, a huge treat for him that he covets, begs for and gets to do ever couple of weeks or so. He gorges on kidvid and juice and the random sugary treat and has a good time feeling grown up and daring. Good times.

Mojo is swaddled in our big sleigh bed, probably in a pink rayon chrysalis formed from our third-favorite sheets (very cool and sleek but impossible to keep from sliding off and that ted to pill up like sonsofbitches. She's had a long, hard week, and feels a little run-after, and run-down.

Maxine is crouched in her big girl bed having thrown all her covers OFF, as usual - the girl has something against blankets besides being one of Nature's most athletic sleepers. We're watching her carefully because she had a terrible nosebleed today; shocking the daycare staff and sending both of her parents careering across Portland to get to her. She's fine, her usual happy self, but her cleft makes these nosebleeds a potential health issue. We'll be watching her carefully over the weekend.

We're in the midst of a lawn-and-garden project in the northeast corner of the front yard that was put in time-out by the appalling heat of the past week but looks to be a go for the coming weekend. The dryer seems to have finally given up, so that's an expense we're going to have to make. I like to think of it as doing our little bit to help the people at Goldman Sachs get their...sorry, our...economy ck up and running again. Lucky fucking us.

My work is still dire. Slow isn't the word for it, it's practically stopped. Hopefully we'll see something start to pick up soon. Otherwise...brrr.

We're creeping towards Mojo's 43rd birthday this Labor Day, and our second Family Day with Maxine in September. My in-laws are coming for a week-long visit next Saturday. The heat, hopefully, will have abated by then. Big Peeper starts first grade in a month. He's had a trying summer, what with an increasingly cute and demanding sister all over him, and no school friends to help pass the time faster. Poor little guy is very weepy these days; yesterday he told me, in tears, that he'd "had a hard day", for all the world like a little burnt-out Mamet adman wearing a Transformers T-shirt.

Why am I meandering around all this stuff?

Because I'm treading water. Between work and family and friends and home and whatever my blogging has suffered. I note with some sour displeasure that my post count for July was 11. Eleven. Eleven fucking posts is probably the lowest monthly total since, hell, since probably some time in 2006.

I have some posts I'd like to write. I want to talk about the Boring Lavas, Portland's own urban volcanoes. This year's Tour de France got me thinking about our culture of celebrity and what it's doing to us and our worldview. And, of course, there's always fun, oddball stuff like chicken fried bacon...

But I just don't seem to have the time and, when I do there always seems to be something more pressing. Or inescapable. Or desirable,like playing with sweet, giggly little girls or exciting, imaginative little boys. Or winsomely, sweet, desirable wives.

So I'm going to try and make some time for us here. Because I value our little on-line community, and the only way for us to stay part of each other's lives is to keep meeting here.

But right now, I've gotta get some sleep.

G'night.