4 February 2000

About mid-morning yesterday, I decided I wanted a mocha coffee. The coffee service provides not only coffee, but also hot chocolate packets, so I emptied a packet of chocolate into my mug and started pouring coffee over it.

I looked up to see Mike Behind the File Cabinet standing in the door, staring at me. "What are you doing?"

"Mocha coffee," I answered.

"What's that?" he asked.

Since Mike drinks his coffee black, he'd never looked in the cabinet over the coffee machine where the creamer, sugar, and hot chocolate mix are stored. I showed him the stash. He looked dubious, but thought he'd give it a try. Two minutes later we were both back at our desks.

"Hey!" he exclaimed. "This is really good!"

I laughed. "No day in which you learn something new is wasted," I said, and went back to work.

I was hip-deep in my current problem, so I wasn't paying much attention to my office-mates' comings and goings. A little while later, Mike Behind the File Cabinet came in and told me, "This is fantastic! I'm on my third cup!"

I looked at the clock. It had only been half an hour. In half an hour, he'd drunk three cups of coffee and three packets of chocolate powder.

You know how I said I can tell whether he's at his desk by whether his monitor is shaking from his leg bouncing?

Yesterday Random (Mike I Can See) and I were placing bets on how long it would take for him to shake the monitor right off the desk.

Well, this is it. I'm working a half-day today. At noon, I'll go home and pack for SheVaCon, and hopefully Matt and I will be on the road by 2 or 3. This will be the first con I've gone to since I got my digital camera that will be featuring any big names. (SciCon, which I usually go to, was cancelled this year, and MarsCon doesn't have much of a budget for guests.) So hopefully I'll have some pictures when I get back!

I'm trying not to get too excited about this con. When I get excited about cons, I always wind up disappointed. It's hard to remember later how much down-time there is. And I don't think I know many people coming to this con, so I won't be able to socialize quite as much.

Well, if the con turns out to be really lame, Roanoke is less than an hour from both Christiansburg and Lynchburg, where we have friends. (Of course, Christiansburg and Lynchburg are in opposite directions, but that's life for you.) But I hope it'll turn out to be fun. I'm looking forward to meeting Steve Miller and Sharon Lee, the authors of the Liaden universe books. I've been on their mailing list for a couple of years now, and they seem really nice. For the first time ever, I'm going to a Con where I recognize all the names on the Guests-of-Honor list. (Which reminds me, if I can find what's left of my Magic cards, I want to dig out a few for NeNe Thomas to sign - I got rid of most of my cards, but kept copies of the ones with artwork I especially liked.)

We'll see, I suppose. See you on Monday!

3 February 2000

Yesterday when I got home, Matt met me at the door. "We're going to have an eventful evening," he told me. K.T. had decided to go ahead and have her hair lightened and dyed, and wanted us to come over for dinner so we could see it and take a picture. And Ashby had called and left a message on our answering machine asking us to call him as soon as possible, at his townhouse or at his parents'.

Matt said he'd tried both numbers and not gotten an answer. He played the message for me. The normally exuberant Ashby sounded exhausted and drained. Something was wrong. My first thought was that perhaps his grandmother, who's been ill for some time, had passed away. My second thought was that he wouldn't have called us about that - just dropped out of contact for a little while and then explained when he came back. My third thought was, Oh, god, I hope nothing happened to 'Manda. Amanda is Ashby's sister. He's fairly close to her, and she's been married for less than six months.

I thought I'd try calling Ashby's parents' place again, on the theory that he might have been en route. This time, Ashby's mother answered the phone. I told her who I was and explained that he'd asked us to call. She told me, "I'll let Amanda explain," and handed off the phone. I've never before felt both relief and dread at the same time.

I explained again for Amanda that I was a friend of Ashby's, and he'd asked us to call. Amanda said, "Hold on while I get the funeral information."

"Funeral?!"

Amanda apologized - she thought Ashby had told us - their father had died.

I felt like I'd been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat. I stammered out my sympathies and felt tears welling up. I looked up at Matt and mouthed the news to him; saw the same reaction wash over his face. Amanda gave me the address and phone number of the funeral home and the times for the funeral. I reiterated my sympathies and said my goodbyes, and hung up.

I tried Ashby's number again, and this time he answered the phone. Matt went upstairs to get on the other line so we could both talk to him at once.

It was worse even than we thought. His grandmother had indeed passed away - last Friday - and Ashby had been the one to find his father's body Monday evening. He'd had to fly Tuesday to pick up his mother and bring her home. His father had apparently had a massive heart attack. The doctors believe that he died quickly, which is a small mercy.

Ashby was subdued but calm on the phone. He didn't think he needed us to come for the funeral, he said - he'd just wanted to hear his friends' voices. We hadn't really known his father at all. Ht thought K.T. would want to come up - she'd practically lived with Ashby and his family for a while after she and Matt had broken up, and she liked all of them.

We realized that it was about the time K.T. was due home from the hairdresser's, and thought we'd get off the phone so she could get through when she heard the message on her answering machine. We said goodbye - assured Ashby that if he needed anything he had only to ask - and hung up.

The Okra is dead. I never met him, and yet it seems somehow unreal that the world should continue turning.

I feel for Ashby's mother. In three days, she lost her mother and her husband. I try to assimilate that - to absorb it. I try to imagine how I'd feel if it happened to me, but I can't get a handle on it. It's too big. Too enormous for comprehension.

As expected, K.T. and Kevin are going to lend emotional support to Ashby. They gave me a stack of books to be autographed this weekend at SheVaCon. K.T.'s new hair color looks nice, if not quite what she had in mind. Yes, I took pictures, but I forgot to bring the disk in, so you'll have to settle for a written description - it's a darkish strawberry blonde on top, deepening to a rich honey brown where her old dye job had changed the texture of the hair.

Since Matt and I had forgotten to bring dessert with us, we went over to the mall and had Cinnabon for dessert. I'd actually wanted a cinnamon-sugar pretzel from Auntie Anne's, but they'd run out of cinnamon-sugar to dip the pretzels in, and since we showed up less than half an hour from closing, they didn't want to make any more. So I had a Minibon, which turned out to be quite enough anyway.

I'd wanted, while we were at the mall anyway, to stop in at a couple of stores for some things, but I'd forgotten that the mall closes at 9 during the week, so they were turning out the lights in the food court by the time we'd finished our dessert. Ah, well; another time.

2 February 2000

Wow, what irony. Last year on the 1st of Feb, Matt and I underwent an oral exam to determine if we were responsible enough to be worth considering for a loan for a house. The exam was grueling and rigorous, and left us both feeling slightly stupid.

This year on the 1st of Feb, I was running short on sleep and spent most of the day feeling slightly stupid.

I swear, I didn't accomplish a single thing yesterday without major assistance from someone else. I barely managed to make the coffee, and all we have to do here is put a fresh filter-pack in the bucket and hit a button. Sheesh.

The morning started out slow, and I decided to take things easy and put together a sketch of what I thought the best organization would be for the program I'm supposed to write. Some of it may be too ambitious for my current talents, but I'm trying to work on modular design. If I wind up having to slap together something that isn't modular in order to meet the deadline (which I highly suspect will be the case) then at least I know how it ought to be fixed later.

At any rate, in the process of breaking the program apart into modules, I realized that one of the layers I'd built was something I didn't know how to do. So I thought I'd take a stab at it - see whether it wiggled or played dead.

It not only played dead, but it killed a few things that had previously been wiggling.

I've been a programmer for several years now, and I know that whatever was wrong, it was probably something stupid. So I did what I always like to do in these situations - pull out all the junk and strip everything down to its lowest possible denominator, and then add bits back in until I figured out what was broken.

Except the lowest possible denominator was broken. Took me all the way up until lunch and finally begging my officemates' help to figure out what went wrong.

Since I was getting the lowest possible denominator straight from a book, this probably would've been pretty hard on my esteem, except that it turned out that the book was wrong. How annoying. I need a new book, now, I guess, except that this is pretty much the only book on the market that explains how to write Windows programs with plain C code - all the other books are using various flavors of C++, which I'm not allowed to use. Hmph.

Anyhow, I inched forward all afternoon, finally getting hung up on the second-to-last step right around four. So that's my job for today - figure out the second-to-last step. (Once I figure that out, the final step should be fairly straightforward.)

I apologize, by the way, with boring everyone with work stuff. But one of my biggest problems with work is that, when my year is up and it's time for a performance review, I can't remember what I've done for the past year. So I'm slipping it into my journal. Of course, because at least two people from 3GI read my journal and 3GI is sortof a competitor, I can't really say precisely what the project is. But I'm hoping that a year from now, when I come back and re-read all this garbage, I'll remember what it was.

Maybe I should steal an idea from The Book of Rob and Tracing and make little icons to indicate what I'm going to talk about in a particular section, so if you hate reading about my job, you can just skip to the next section. Thoughts?

I actually walked again yesterday! It helps that Becky comes with me. We talk the whole way around the circle about various trivial things. It's kindof odd - I'd always been told that the right level of aerobic activity is when you have enough breath to talk, but not sing. It's precisely the level that I'm at, walking around the circle with Becky - I'm slightly breathless, but not so much so that I feel the need to shut up to save my wind. This is less activity than I was expecting. Maybe - just maybe - I've finally found the level of activity necessary to keep me from getting discouraged. We'll see; Becky's going out of town on business this weekend, and she'll be gone for at least three weeks.

Yesterday we both decided that our lunches hadn't really been very satisfying, so we stopped at the little food store that's around the corner from the office on our way around the circle. I stopped in front of the rack of small bags of chips - the "Big Grab" sizes that are actually enough for a snack, but would keep me from having to confess that I'd eaten an entire bag of chips in one sitting - and my eye was drawn by bright lettering: "New! Flavor Rush!" the bag exclaimed. Flavor Rush! chips came in two flavors: Sour cream and onion, and BBQ and cheddar. I decided to try the sour cream and onion variety (I'm a little dubious about the combination of barbeque and cheddar flavors) and promised Becky that she could feel the rush, too.

We got back to the office and I opened the bag, and offered it to Becky. She took a chip. I took a chip. We each carefully took a bite...

FLAVOR RUSH! It was like those old Starburst commercials, where biting into the candy would cause a small flood to crash through the ceiling or wall, only intead of being fruit-flavored, this was sour-cream-and-onion flavored! Becky stumbled back a few steps under the onslaught; my chair was flung back with the flood! My officemates got up and started doing a dance, and the Kool-Aid guy burst through the wall...

Well, okay, it wasn't really that exciting. In case you're curious, Flavor Rush! is marketing code for "We put extra flavoring powder on this batch."

When the radio turned itself on this morning, what the disc jockey said in the time it took me to find the snooze button was "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

Now I have that damn song stuck in my head.

You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, do you?

Oh, some of you probably do, and if you do, then you're going to get the song stuck in your head, too. If I'm miserable, everybody's miserable. So there.

But for the rest of you... I grew up with three television shows, if you don't count the kiddie programs like Sesame Street. Oh, there were more than three, I'm sure, but most of them had limited runs. The three I most remember, though, are: The Muppet Show, Star Trek, and Hee-Haw. All three of these were my father's picks. My mom watched intellectual things like The Paper Chase which I simply didn't understand. But my dad had two big loves, really: science fiction shows and movies (he hates to read, or he'd be a huge sci-fi book junkie), and really, really bad jokes.

I'm pretty sure I don't have to explain The Muppet Show or Star Trek. Both of those are pretty much cultural icons for anyone my parents' age or younger - even if you don't like them, you know what they are.

But I don't know how many of you know about Hee-Haw, even if it was on the air for over 20 years. (A quick internet search turns up the dates: 1968 - 1993. Wow.) It interspersed country music with bad jokes. Lots of bad jokes. My dad loved it, though I don't think any of us cared one way or another about the music. (I remember being fascinated by this lady playing a bright blue fiddle because she was fast and the sawing of the bow was almost hypnotic, but none of the music actually stuck.) Lots of bad jokes, though.

It had one often-repeated segment where the jokes centered around what bad luck the characters had, and it had a theme song:

Gloom, despair, and agony - oh, me
Deep dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony - oh, me!

It was my favorite segment, actually. It got to where we'd all sing along with the song. Even my brother and I, who when this started weren't sure what big words like "depression" and "excessive" even meant. And that's what's stuck in my head this morning.

1 February 2000

Ta-da! Yes, providing you with the latest in relief from pink frills and hearts, it's this month's new design!

Don't mind me; I'm a little sleepy today. Last night was... eventful.

On last night's MeadeHall I finally carried out a plan I've been working on - and towards - since October. Namely, my character Maeli died.

Maeli was something of an experiment for me. In an environment dedicated to adventurers, she was completely unremarkable and mundane. She was a seamstress without peer and a fair midwife, but she had no mystical powers. She had never been an adventurer, though her older brother had - he is still alive, a mage of some reknown in far parts of the world. She was frequently crotchety, an incurable busybody, and demanded the respect she felt was due her age - she was over ninety in a setting where mundanes rarely live beyond fifty.

Anyway, at one point I had Maeli come into the Hall shortly after supervising the birth of her youngest granddaughter's first child, and I began to toy with the idea that Maeli - unlike most Hall patrons - was going to die of old age. Hall patrons have died before, usually in a spate of violence. Some of them are immortal. None of them expect to die of old age, however, and the novelty of this idea grew on me. Maeli had outlived her husband and most of her children, and as the months passed, she weakened slowly and steadily. Finally, last night, sitting in front of the Hall's fireplace with her omnipresent knitting and a cup of tea, she dozed off and passed away.

It turned out to be an even more emotional event than I thought it would be. I thought that the other characters would realize she'd died, consider the possibility of bringing her back to life (yeah, most of them are that powerful) decide not to - that she'd lived a long, full life - and maybe say a few kind words about her, perhaps shed a tear or two. And I thought the players would barrage me with private messages asking if this is really what I want, sigh mournfully, and continue on.

Wow. I forgot how closely tied up with our characters we are. Jeff had the expected reaction, but Karen - whose character Lisl had been both contemplating her own aging and worrying over Maeli's fragility - confessed to bawling her eyes out. Matt looked at me pitifully. "Did Maeli just die?!?" he demanded.

I nodded.

He closed the gaming book he'd been leafing through and slammed it down on his table. He was furious, and for a while I thought he was actually angry at me. On the Hall he revealed that his character Rhys had a potion of longevity that he'd been planning on giving Maeli, as soon as he found the right time. (I didn't try to tell him that she would've refused the potion, though I'd decided weeks ago that she would refuse all magical solutions to her weakening state - she knew she was dying, and was almost relieved to know she would soon be able to lay down her burdens.)

I was touched by Karen's reaction, but Matt's floored me. It angered me, too - how dare he get this angry? I didn't deserve having things slammed at me. (Understand, Matt's been extremely tense for a couple of months now, and I've been walking on eggshells because it seemed like the dumbest little things had been setting off his temper. This tantrum was the nether end of Too Much.) I was emotional over Maeli's death, myself - I'd grown to love the old biddy while I was playing her, and it takes a lot of emotional strength to kill a character.

I tried to blow up back at him, but couldn't; I was too drained. I went into the bathroom and thought about locking myself in for a while, but I was fighting some kind of nervous energy and couldn't sit still. I went back to my computer, but one look at Matt - resolutely glaring at his computer, refusing to even look at me - and I couldn't sit there, either. I went downstairs with every intention of finding a dark corner to curl up into and waiting for him to calm down again. But I couldn't stay away. I paced around the kitchen, then came back up the stairs.

As I came back up the stairs, I encountered Matt, who was coming to explain that he wasn't mad at me - just upset that Maeli had died. The dam broke - the nervous tension that had been building up in me just exploded, and I broke down. Standing in the dark hallway, both of us crying, I told him that he'd been operating on a short fuse for months and that I was tired of it and I wanted to know when I was going to get my husband back.

Matt was surprised. He hadn't realized that his tension had been outwardly noticeable. That wasn't hard for me to understand - I've done the same thing on occasion. He mentioned a few things that were causing the tension and which I'd sortof suspected. He promised to try to keep a better rein on his temper, now that he knew it was a problem. He wondered why I hadn't said anything before, and I explained that the timing was always wrong: I didn't think he'd listen to me when he was in the midst of being irritable, and I hadn't wanted to ruin his good moods by bringing it up. (I had in fact attempted to tell him on a few occasions when I thought he was overreacting, but been brushed aside.)

Finally, reconciled but still shaky with reaction, we went back to our computers to let Karen and Jeff know we hadn't spontaneously combusted. Since there was no way we were going to sleep until we relaxed, we sat and chatted with them until Karen had to leave at 11.

I'm glad the subject was finally broached. It had been needed for a long time, and if it was the emotional catharsis provided by Maeli's death that allowed it, then so be it. Now, hopefully, like opening an infection and draining the pus, it will finally be able to heal.

But I'm very tired this morning.

31 January 2000

So the Super Bowl was last night, and that had to be the most disappointing round of commercials I've seen in a long time. Traditionally, I watch the Super Bowl exclusively for the commercials. It's during the game that I get up to fix snacks, refill my drink, or go to the bathroom. And last night, the commercials were almost unbelieveably bad.

Oh, there were a few good ones. Yeah, I got sortof choked up at the commercial that had Christopher Reeve walking. The two commercials that made me laugh out loud were Mountain Dew's parody of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and the "cat-herding" commercial, though I can't remember who sponsored that one. The cats being driven through a river just cracked me up, and the "catboys" sitting around their evening fires winding string and using a sticky-lint-roll on their leather jackets was hysterical. I enjoyed Britannica.Com's quiet list of questions, but figured it would be too staid for the vast majority of watchers.

As if to make up for the lousy commercials, the game was relatively good - at least at the end. I really thought it was going to go into overtime when the Titans tied the score at 16, and then for a minute or two there I thought they might do it again right at the end. Well played!

I more or less quit listening to the announcers pretty early on; when one of them was talking about the fact that Atlanta was hosting the game, he said, "They've been pretty good to you and I." I cringed, and my spine tried to take up residence inside my brain. I thought we'd settled the usage of "me" and "I" way back in like eighth grade! Oh, well. (I now fully expect at least four e-mails telling me I'm being entirely too sensitive to the issue and that I'm probably the only person in the country who even noticed.)

We finished up Matt's Star Wars adventure on Saturday. That was a lot of fun, even if I was mostly ineffectual in combat. (As I pointed out, "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.") And we had Greg along, which means that I didn't actually get to figure out any of the riddles, because Greg is just this much faster than me at that sort of thing. Oh, well; I enjoyed playing diplomat.

Matt's thinking about putting together a 7th Sea game next, so I'm going to have to look through the book again to get some ideas for a character. I had one idea, but it's almost certain that the rest of the party would kill me sooner or later, so it's probably best left as an NPC. No, I'm not going to tell you! I might decide to run it after all, or Matt might decide to borrow the idea for one of his NPCs! (See this box?)

I'm fighting allergies again. I spent most of yesterday in a drugged daze, sniffling and sneezing because the drugs didn't do all that much good. I've started taking my Claritin again, but I don't know how much good that will do, either, because I highly suspect the sinus trouble is a direct result of having the weather systems fluctuate so quickly, and all I can do is ride it out. And invest in a container of Carmex.

I'm thinking of going back on the Weight Watcher's diet for a month or so; I've noticed that I'm eating way too much junk food again. I don't want to go back to going to the meetings, but I can follow the diet without going to meetings. Or maybe I'll just stop letting myself eat so much junk food. We'll see.

I finally remembered to bring diet soda to work to drink, though, so that's a help. What I ought to do is start getting some - any exercise. Dad says it's exactly one mile around the loop that our office building is on. Maybe I'll start going out during lunch and walking around the loop. Dad's offered to let me walk with him, but he "power-walks" which is way too fast for me, and besides he doesn't always go at the same time each day. But now that I'm actually working on a project at work, I'll need to take a break once in a while. And even a leisurely walk has to be better for me than sitting on my duff!

Speaking of that project, I'd better get on with it...

28 January 2000

On Friday my supervisor, CK, came into our office and told us that he was almost done breaking down some task into modules, and said that by Monday evening, we'd all have real projects to work on.

Monday afternoon, he came into our office and said that he had a meeting all afternoon, and that he'd sit down with us Tuesday morning and give us projects.

Tuesday and Wednesday, neither CK nor my officemates came in to the office because of the snow and crap on the roads.

Yesterday, CK seemed to have forgotten altogether about the possibility of giving us work to do. So in a fit of boredom, I'm writing my own personal version of Minesweeper.

I get mesmerized by games really easily. Especially fairly simple games that don't require high levels of thought. In college, before I had Windows, I spent hours at a time playing Tetris - which was especially mesmerizing on my monochrome monitor. When I went to grad school, I cashed in about half of my savings account and bought a brand new computer with Windows installed. I had no life in grad school, and I spent all my time playing Minesweeper. (I'd played it for months before I learned about clicking both buttons. That almost halved my times.) I was the Minesweeper goddess. I'd seen better scores bragged online, but I didn't know anyone personally who could beat me.

I could play Minesweeper without really thinking about it, while I mulled over some other problem. I invented variations of the game - playing without flags, or having to move only to adjacent squares. Like that.

Now I'm at a new job, and corporate policy won't let the IS department install even simplistic Minesweeper and Solitare games on our computers. So when I was faced with another long day of nothing to do, and the idea came to me of writing a Minesweeper game - maybe even include my variant rules and a system of lives and points rather than a simple timer - it seemed pretty reasonable.

It's harder than I thought it would be. But at least I'm not as bored.

Matt was almost done making dinner last night when K.T. called and asked if we wanted to meet her and Kevin and Matt O. for dinner somewhere. Matt put the decision in my hands (which I think was cheating, since it was his night to do dinner) but since I've been feeling sortof cabin-feverish, I decided dinner out sounded good, especially since they'd decided to go to Don Pablo's.

So about forty-five minutes later, Matt and I sat down to a table at Don Pablo's, and a few minutes after that, the rest of them showed up. Our waiter was a stitch.

"What can I get you to drink? Soda, lemonade, marguerita, shot of tequila...?"

K.T. spoke up: "Diet whatever."

"Diet tequila! Right!"

Giving our orders, K.T. asked, "And can I get a side of sour cream?"

"No way!"

When I'm out with my friends, I like a friendly waiter; I fall right into step behind Matt's grandfather, who asks restaurant hostesses to give him "a waitress he can harass." Occasionally Matt and I will be having a romantic evening, in which case I want the waiter to stay in the background as much as possible. But usually, I enjoy having a waiter or waitress who understands that they are part of my experience and who want to make it enjoyable for me.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

We finally got our project. It looks like it's going to be a truncated version of the project I was on at 3GI before I left. Argh! Will I never escape??!?

At least this time I got to pick which piece I was going to work on. I chose the one that, while being potentially more effort, was less likely to make me run screaming for the hills. Why can't I get a job that doesn't involve internet security?

Oh, well. Guess I'd better go read some manuals...

27 January 2000

Okay, so I didn't write any more yesterday. Just as I was resigning myself to the idea of staying home all day and having to make up rather a lot of missed work at some point, my dad decided to come in to the office after all, so I got to work just over four hours yesterday.

Much to my astonishment, when I added up the hours I'd worked this week, along with the extra hour I have from last week, I'm only short by four hours. So I'm trying to decide what to do about it. If I work ten hours today and tomorrow, then I won't have to make any up. Or I could work nine-and-a-half hour days and make up the last hour from my leave. Or I could just work nine hour days and either make up the two hours from my leave or actually make them up later. Lots of options. I think what I'll do is walk over to the main suite today and ask to see how awful the paperwork is for making up the hours later - see whether it's worth a little bit of leave.

In case you didn't notice, there's a new line at the top: Today marks this journal's first birthday! For one year today, I've been sharing the details of my life! Happy Birthday, Reflections!

Okay, that's enough exclamation marks for now. The "Last year" link won't be there every day, of course - I didn't start writing on a regular basis until sometime in March, and even then I've missed weekends and occasional weekdays. But if there's an entry to show, then I'll show it.

Something interesting about that first entry - Reflections trivia, if you will - I actually wrote it on the 26th of January. If you look at the URL of the link (most browsers show it in the status bar) you'll see the date on it is 19990126. But I didn't post it until the 27th, and so that's the date in the entry, and that's why the journal's birthday is today and not yesterday. I guess you could say it was a long labor.

I must say, I'm a little astonished that I made it this far. I've never been able to keep a paper journal for very long. I've got one at home, and I write in it maybe twice a year, usually when I'm feeling depressed and full of angst. The entries there are full of melodrama and are embarassing to read even a few days later.

So why have I been able to keep an online journal so much better? The simplest answers are that I'm a geek, so a geek journal draws me more; or that I've made my daily writing part of my routine, so my writing every morning is habitual, sortof like brushing my teeth. But the real answer is that I have an audience here. According to my logs, about twelve people a day read this journal. Some of them are random hits, of course, and at least one of them is me, checking to make sure everything uploaded all right. There are some friends who check only once a week, though, so my current guess is that I've got about ten regular readers. At least two of them are people I've never met in the flesh, and I find that somewhat surprising; I thought I would only attract "real-life" friends who were curious to know what was happening in my life and fascinated to occasionally see their names in print.

I'm not really a hit-hound. I write because I want to and need to, and it's enough for me to know that I have an audience even if the audience is - as it was at the beginning - no more than the few who were closest to me in real life. I've debated many times taking down the sitelogs altogether and only learning of my readers when they felt compelled to write to me. I didn't re-establish my Open Pages link when I moved my site, and I'm still trying to decide if I'm ever going to.

It's a delicate balance to maintain. Really, I write this journal for myself. I think reading the old entries is fascinating, really. It's fun to read over my speculations, knowing how it turned out. It's interesting to read about events that I've completely forgotten and think, Oh, yeah, I remember that now! or even more peculiar, I did that? I thought that? Wow, how weird. But the reason I keep writing is because I have an audience, and I don't want to disappoint them - you. I like to think that if I stopped writing suddenly, if I skipped more than one or two days without prior warning, I'd get a few e-mails asking what had happened, and I'd be reminded to write again. Just knowing that you're there is enough to make sure I write something every day, even if it's just a brief explanation that there's nothing going on worth writing about.

But then, one of the things I've learned over the past year is that it never happens that there's nothing to write about. I complained about it a lot toward the beginning, that there was nothing exciting happening. As the year goes on, I made that statement less and less. If there wasn't anything I wanted to write about, then I made something up. Talked about my childhood or my past or my family or wrote fiction, even. There's always something to write about. It's an interesting lesson to have learned.

I can't wait to see what the next year teaches me. I hope you'll all be there with me as I learn it. I am deeply and sincerely grateful to every one of you - even those of you I don't know or even know about - for joining me on this journey.

In celebration of Reflection's birthday, would you do me a huge favor? Even if you wound up here by accident or at random, even if today is the first day you've ever read this journal and you never intend to come back, would you please follow this link and answer the question posed? (I promise, no statistics will be collected, no cookies set unless you ask for them, and no junk mail will result.)

Thanks.