Update

I am sorry for the long break in posting. Blame it on events:

1. Family crisis that has been dragging on for more than three months – the sort of eat it, drink it, sleep it, walk it, poop it and bore your long-suffering friends with it family crisis. Also expensive, emotionally draining and requiring many many phone calls.
2. I quit the awful job. That is a tale to tell all by itself, but now at least I don’t have to open phone calls with the greeting, “Have I mentioned lately how much I hate my fucking job?” And that is nice.
3. I’m back among the good people at the Big Important Scientific Institution, and I feel that I have had a lucky escape. However, my commute takes 1.5 to 2 hours each way.
4. Took on a rather demanding editing project for a friend in exchange for some coaching services from same friend and the coaching is at least as demanding as the editing.
5. Making an effort to get one Notebook project to the next stage.
6. Having to mow the acre of lawn and whack weeds.
7. Having to look for new housing, not quite in the middle of nowhere. (A place has been found, by the way, in DC itself). Much as I’ve enjoyed the Tick Ranch, and much as the dogs have enjoyed it, enough is enough.
8. Having to pack and move and dispose of stuff.
9. I’m basically in the middle of all of this, though the editing project is finished and the quitting of the last job is obviously still not going on.

In the middle of all of this I was actually working on a long piece of bloggage. But I got stuck and then I just got stubborn. I've spent weeks writing and rewriting this thing and it's so tracked over, out of date and irrelevant that the best thing to do would be to let it die a natural death.

Now this all sounds terrible. But the net of it is good and, except for the family crisis which I could well do without, is tending towards better.

Even the long commute is an improvement as I am guaranteed about three hours of reading a day. And I can’t tell you how much I’ve been enjoying that. But of course I will.