Personnel Update

I’m Eric, and I’ve been around with this blog since the beginning. Back then, I was quite the avid blogger, writing several times a week in two different blogs. Then, I got married, moved out, started a job, and started going to bed before 3 a.m. Somehow, this has caused a big change in a lot of my personal habits, including my blogging.

As it is, I have enjoyed much of the change, but I sometimes miss all of the interaction I had with blogs and message boards back in the day. Jake tells me that it takes some time to sort things out when you get married, and this is probably the case. Marital bliss is great though, and I think it makes up for the changes. I do apologize to my friends who have had to put up with a quieter me. And to my wife who has to listen to me all the time, including when she’s trying to do homework or sleep. Also, I snore, and she’s been a very good sport about that. I’m sure it will stop being cute

So drastic is my life changed that it’s taking me days just to write this. I wrote the first two paragraphs Tuesday afternoon, but was interrupted by my wife and sister-in-law coming home with dinner. I couldn’t get back to it that night, and then yesterday while I was coming home from work I got a call from my mother. It turns out that my grandfather is in the hospital for kidney problems that are being complicated by prostate cancer. I didn’t get home until quite late.

Every day seems like that. Even if I come home and don’t have to go somewhere, the computer is tied up doing homework. I’m working a lot too, and I am traveling about once a month. Between now and Santa Lucia day, there’s at least three trips that I’m likely to be sent on, each to a different state. If I’m lucky, one will be close to D.C. so that I can swing by and visit my brother.

Now, after finishing two more paragraphs, I’m being pulled away to make cookies. Before I got married, such urges would be put off until everyone had gone to bed (unless that’s when I was writing).

So, I don’t have a lot of stories that I haven’t told. There was the one about when I got engulfed in a ball of flame, but I think my fellow forum members have heard it.

When I was a senior in high school, I lived all alone in the basement for an entire winter. My brother, who usually lived in the adjacent room to my own, was away, and my other brother hadn’t yet moved in to take his place. Our two rooms were built at the same time, and since his was on the north side of the house, the thermostat for the basement was placed in his room.

Several times during that winter, I would be in my room doing homework, and gradually notice that I was cold. Not just a little chilly, but actually cold. I’d eventually get up and check the thermostat, where I would find that it had been turned down as far as it would go. I would turn it up to a more respectable temperature and go back to work. A few weeks later, it would happen again. And again.

Apparently, someone decided that since the room was unoccupied, there was no need to heat it. What always amazed me was that I’d usually be working for several hours in a 50° room without really noticing it.