It's uncharacteristic for me to write about work when things are going well. This may have something to do with a need to vent anxieties and frustrations, or it may have something to do with having so much extra time on my hands. I haven't had so much extra time on my hands of late, so the latter seems realistic.

I've spent the better part of a week in a mild panic about getting a pair of new sites up and out. One is for a design house I've been enjoying working with, and the other is direct for a business owner -- I don't want to let either down. Fortunately, I've managed to get enough done in the right places that as long as I keep running I may make it through September. One of my new clients has been exceedingly patient, but I still hate making my clients wait. Two more major projects, and a couple of minor ones, are all slated to start this week. Whew!

I find myself with one of those brief periods of calm that I don't want to ruin with work quite yet, so I get to play catch-up. The projects I've been working on have been exceedingly cool. The designs have all been really super snappy and it's been a real pleasure to get to work with the latest versions of osCommerce and Drupal. I've built up a collection of osC modules downloaded from the vast repository of contributions, and even managed to generate a couple of pretty cool modules on my own that I plan to clean up and upload. In my free time, that is. It'll look really good on the H-C website that I'll be fixing up with my remaining spare time. (sigh.)

All of this work has had the marvelous side effect of pushing my expertise up a level. I've finally made so many mistakes that I've built up a pretty good collection of processes and fixes for nearly every problem that comes up. I still need to work on staying allocated to jobs as I had scheduled them. I thought I had a pretty good system set up, but then I got really busy and the system ended up being too difficult to maintain and not nearly as effective as I needed it to be. At least I've got a good system for capturing my hours. I'm working on getting my existing clients to agree to stop supporting IE6 by the end of the year -- that will cut 20-25% of the development time out of the process and allow for much better design.

I've been pretty good about making it to the gym at least twice a week, and continue to make progress: weights and reps gradually increase bi-weekly, and my running speeds were doing great until I switched to a different elliptical machine and now I'm starting completely over. I call the new machine "the Borg Walker": it has this dynamic stride mechanism that varies from stair-step to a full run, but weighted so it's like running waist-deep in water. It's so hard core, my heart rate averages at least 10bpm higher on this thing than the previous machine. Even the slowest speeds are a serious workout -- I have to warm up and cool down on a treadmill.

I do allow myself to do other things. Spiral Scouts, my book, and "Rome: Total Warfare" each get about 4 hours of my time a week. My rotation to lead the scouts has come around, so suddenly, I'm responsible for meeting planning and execution. It's all good, because it gives me an opportunity to directly build the esprit de corps and devote more of my own self into the group. I have something of a learning curve in that I didn't really do the scouting thing (for very long) as a youth; yet this is also an advantage in that I must be more creative and humble because of it. The book is actually seeing more progress than I would have expected. My strategy of focusing that drive I have to write 1000 words at a time into chapter-writing sessions has worked out well: so far, it's 12% done.

Great. This sucked up twice as much time as I had wanted it to. This is exactly why I've not been posting so much. I apologize to anyone who actually likes to read my posts and feels neglected because I'm focusing on my book. Hopefully, when you get to read the book, that will make up for some of it and I can put my focus back here. Where it really belongs.