Excuses, Excuses

While weblog entries lamenting the lack of updates to a web site border on inflated ego (my audience misses me!) and frivolity (writing about the lack of writing), I'm writing one anyway.

The reason for my absence should be pretty easy to guess -- that final, mad dash of responsibilities (both personal and professional) that always seem to pile up right at the time when you hoped to relax, drink cocktails, wear silly red hats, and gaze at the towering blinking mass of ornaments and pine propped-up in your living room. Instead, you find yourself wandering aimlessly through the hell that is the shopping mall, anxiously second-guessing what all the people on your list would enjoy for presents, frantically pounding the keyboard trying to meet multiple project deadlines, and wishing to God the holiday music channel on Comcast digital cable would refrain from playing any Christmas songs by Britney Spears. Santa hears you Britney, and he wishes you would STFU.

Outside of work, within the past week I've gone bowling to the sounds of Dirty Mind while drinking pitchers of Icehouse (something I haven't consumed since college), greeted endless strangers wearing a pressed black-tie tuxedo at a very-swank corporate Christmas party (where, I should add, I was virtually the only guy wearing a real bow tie), was told rather solemnly by a doctor that the cat I've adored and cared for for over a decade required an operation (bladder stones), and killed a couple of late nights -- when the holiday insanity reached a boil -- robbing myself of much-needed energy by giddily blasting alien vermin in the time-sucking vortex that is Halo.

Between work, life, and guilty-pleasures, everything should hopefully slow down by next week. Guests are flying in, Christmas dinners are to be cooked, and I'll be juggling goblets of red wine while popping antibiotics down furball's throat. Ahhh...Christmas bliss.