It used to be easy, before it was every day. Some things supposedly get easier the more you do them, but the more you do them the more they change on you. The more they turn into something ever so slightly different. That doesn’t make them any less enjoyable, but it does make it more difficult to pull them from the mass and fog in your mind when you need to. The ether gets sticky, less permeable than it used to be, when you were plunging through it headfirst, full tilt, not caring to pay attention to the mile markers on the side of the road. When it mattered more than you were headed somewhere and less where you were going and how well the journey was progressing, as it were.

Slowly it changes. Suddenly the signs around you matter more. The travel becomes more of the joy and the things around you are more important. You spend more time soaking up the air along the way, running less feverishly and instead pacing yourself, not because you’re not in a hurry, or because the destination isn’t important, but because you really, really do want to enjoy your trip. You let the anticipation bubble up inside you like a minor panic while you progress, providing just enough adrenaline to help you keep moving while simultaneously reminding you how great the whole affair really is. It’s a tingle in your stomach that, while it’s not as easy as it used to be, is really enjoyable.

So it’s not as easy as it once was, but hell if it’s not as much fun.

It’s spring now. It’s been a long winter, or at least it felt like one. Cold, bitter, snowy, but just snowy enough to make it the real thing. It felt like winter, which was nice in and of itself. Now, on the other hand, it’s starting to really feel like spring – green is reappearing, and I can see the branches and the leaves waving gently from my window while I write. It’s a lovely thing, a zen thing, that makes everything just a little bit easier. The green touches the blue skies with the tips of its branches, reaching up to say hello the same way I do every morning.

I remember a long time ago I used to walk into work in the mornings and always look up – looking up is important, mind you, it’s something too many of us forget to do as we keep our eyes on the ground in front of our feet – and I’d watch the hawks and falcons floating on the thermals high above my head and envy them. Logically, of course, I know there isn’t much to envy, but I appreciated their ability to float and fly, to come and go, to choose their own direction and follow it.

I still envy them the gift of flight, but I feel more like I have a few things in common with them than I used to. And that’s a beautiful, wonderful, heart-swelling thing for me to type.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used this image, but it’s still one of the first ones that leaps to my mind when I start thinking about autumn – the changing colors, the bright beauty, the fading light, and the coming cold…they’re all there. I fell in love with this long before I realized the character in it is Shameimaru Aya, from Touhou Project. Even though I’m not at all versed in Touhou’s incredibly deep and expansive lore and history, I still love the imagery here, and how frequently this character is associated with fall and falling leaves. I kind of dig her old school camera, too.

That said, we’re looking at October now, and 2012 is heading rapidly for a close. I’m kind of surprised at how quickly this year has passed: everything seemed to move so slowly at the beginning of the year, and then somewhere during the summer everything picked up the pace. Still, I’m speaking from a place of personal perspective – I just hope that the holidays this year aren’t too difficult to deal with.

I’ve been slowly but surely making time and space for my personal and pet projects–a little here and a little there, nothing drastic or major just yet, but the key to being more productive for me is to better manage my time, and I’m glad to report that at least some of that it working well for me. I still think I could use a vacation, and I’m certain I’d be able to take a day off here and there in the coming weeks (maybe even for my birthday), but with Raevyn starting a new job herself, I don’t think any week-long getaways will be in order for a bit. Still, a couple of spare days just to pick up some of the latest video games would be enough recharging for me, I think. I’m a dork like that.

In other news, I’ve been working pretty hard to minimize my “urban guilt,” as they call it – having moved into the city, I try to make sure I get out on the weekends to experience the city for all it’s worth. All of the farmer’s markets and espresso shops, new businesses and budding districts…I know it can be tough on Raevyn sometimes to get dragged around town to a new shop or restaurant, but I’m hoping she’s enjoying the lifestyle a bit too, as long we don’t go overboard. Just a couple of weeks ago we discovered that a historic market in DC recently reopened, and the place is brimming with great shops, nice people, and a killer Peregrine Espresso bar. Our usual haunt for fresh veggies and quality meats and cheeses is no slouch either, but it’s always good to have selection, especially considering when I lived in the suburbs, the only “selection” I really had was which chain grocery store to drive to.

That all said, some of these wonderful markets just make me miss New York City, and the beautiful Union Square holiday market that pops up there every year. I went a few years back when I was in town for the holidays, just taking an impromptu vacation on my own, and I still miss it – and miss the city. It might be time for another visit, but I’m sure I’ve said that before.

So even though I wrote about them at Lifehacker today, I really have to send some love over to the folks at Relaux for their killer playlists. I’m listening to one – biomimicry, as the name implies – right now, and I adore it. It’s one of my favorites, but not quite the fave. If you give the site a shot, I’ll be curious to hear what you prefer. Personally, I find the music is the perfect sweet spot of interesting and work-oriented, so I can focus on the task at hand and get things done while I’m listening. Kind of like Freefall in that respect.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, it’s about time I brought out the long sleeves, fluffed them a bit, and maybe stretched out the wrinkles from storage. After all, this is my favorite time of year.

I’ve been in love with Toradora! for way longer than I’ve been able to see it. I think I found out about it about two years ago, and I’ve been wanting to see it ever since. It popped up on Hulu a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve been watching it ever since. We finished it last night, and suffice to say, it’s pretty moving. I mean, sure, it’s a high school slice of life anime like many others, complete with very typical characters, but it does a great job of exploring the complexities of love and the hard choices that come with it. It cut a little deep personally, but I think part of it is that I have so much history with this story, so take that with a grain of salt. I hear the manga is still running in Japan. I might have to give it a shot, if for no other reason than that the story doesn’t have to end yet.

Today was fairly busy – we got up relatively early and headed out to our local farmer’s market to pick up a few things, then over to District Taco for lunch. I freaking love that place. We filled up the tanks, and then headed over to the newly opened Union Market in DC to check out the sights and sounds. A lot of the vendors have yet to move in, but the atmosphere is still really nice already, the place is nice and open and airy, and the food looks delicious. We picked up some freshly baked bread and makings for dinner tonight, and the Peregrine Espresso stand was a sight to behold. Tons of long-necked kettles, pour-over coffee stands, and one stunning mocha, made just for me. I think it helped that I was wearing my Refill Required t-shirt. Still, gentleman making the brews was incredibly nice, and waved to us long after we’d finished our coffees, browsed a bit more, and left the market. Suffice to say we’ll be back.

Tonight though, it’s all about the spoils from the market before heading off to bed, and hopefully looking forward to another day of adventure tomorrow. We’ll see, though.

The past few days Raevyn’s been getting up really early for training at her new job, which has kind of put me off for a bit admittedly – it’s thrown off my exercise schedule a little, and while I don’t think my writing has really been affected, it’s definitely taken a little getting used to. I feel more like a stereotypical blogger, working in my pajamas and cleaning up whenever I get the chance, instead of having the kind of tried and true “going to work” ritual I had when I was the first one to get out of bed. I suppose that’s the trouble with working from home. Still don’t think I’d trade it.

Earlier today Raevyn and I were talking some things over – mostly about how hard it’s been for me the past year or so, even without me really knowing or understanding it. Even before my mother passed away, things were getting harder-for a number of reasons, not just my mother’s passing-but while I’ve tried to take them all on the chin, I’m coming to see the cracks in my armor for what they are. The immediate danger has mostly passed, so it’s difficult to ignore them anymore and just keep pressing on. I’m starting to see the damage, I’m starting to feel it, and the worst part of it all is that I’m not entirely sure what to do about it.

It’s one thing to just say “sheesh, I need a vacation,” but taking time off to recoup and recover only works if you’re actually recharging during that time. If you’re not recharging, not taking care of yourself, and just brooding and feeling worn down and weary the whole time, it hasn’t done you much good, has it? I don’t have answers honestly – I don’t know what I should do – but I know I really have to do something. I’m the type of person that knows how important it is to live now, how essential it is to live right now, in this moment, and yet I can’t keep my mind off of how things aren’t what I want them to be, which is healthy enough in small doses, but when it takes over like it has, it’s a constant distraction from the present. It’s getting to me.

It’s pretty rough all around. I look around and see things I want to change but don’t have the energy or the power or the expertise to handle on my own, and I see problems that I know have solutions but I can’t figure out what they are. I feel like I need to be more creative, more inspired, more active, and yet I don’t feel like there are hours in the day to do what I need to do to get there. A lot of it is taking a step at a time, making lists, and so on, but I’ve been writing at Lifehacker long enough to know that making a to-do list to get you where you want to go is a great step, but it’s just that – and it doesn’t get the job done. If you spend all day making to-do lists, the sun will set and you won’t have really gotten anywhere.

Venting, I think. Like I said, I don’t have answers, just tons of questions.

That said, I have little to complain about, and I’m aware of that. It doesn’t make any of this weigh less heavily on my mind when I wake and before I sleep.

Maybe I do just need a vacation.

My, it’s been a long time. That’s unfortunate, but like I often say, I don’t want to get bogged down in blogging about blogging, so let’s move on, shall we?

When you’re confronted with a situation you’re hard pressed to deal with, I think the biggest challenge is how to manage your feelings about the situation. I’m not talking about how you approach the issue in terms of action: usually that’s something that’s all laid out for you already. Either you can do something or not, and those options are usually laid out in front of you and it’s up to you to pick the best one. That in itself can be difficult, but it pales in comparison to controlling how you feel about it.

I bring this up because the weather is starting to turn cold again, and with it my melancholy is inching back – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but it does make me take notice of my own behavior. I feel like I’m in a creative slump, even though I feel like I’m on the cusp of being more creative (seasons changing always does this to me), I feel more sensitive to the perceptions and opinions of the people around me even though I know better than to be. I’m worried I’ve made mistakes that I can’t take back, even though those “mistakes” have made me immensely happy. I’m a little on the depressed side.

And yet, what to do about it escapes me. I have these glimmering moments of clarity – the ones I always enjoy so much – where watching the steam rise off of a hot cup of tea makes me inspired in ways nothing else could, or watching an ice cube slowly melt into a finger of scotch makes me feel creative like no brainstorming session or roundtable ever would. The key, of course, is to make those moments the norm, and the doubt the exception to the rule. Maybe I just need more music.

Fall is coming. It’s my favorite season, if for no other reason than the chill temperatures, the opportunity to put on sleeves again or sport hoodies around town (although clearly I have to be careful doing such a thing, apparently), and the changing colors and smells in the air. The year will come to a close soon, and I’ll be confronted with the first anniversary of my mother’s passing. It’s a complicated topic – one I’m not even entirely sure I’ve addressed completely, but I don’t know if there’s much need to. We keep walking because we have to, we keep breathing because we can, and we should live as much as we can in the time that we have.

I’ll admit, I’ve had an odd obsession with mortality since my mother’s passing, but I at least hope I’ve managed to temper it into something that will make me appreciate my time more than live in perpetual fear of the day I’ll eventually be lowered into the ground. Now then, off of morbid topics, eh?

I’ve been meaning to make more time for myself lately. I love my work at Lifehacker, but I find it’s entirely too easy to catch myself working from sunup to sundown when I work from home, doing little other than waking, working, napping if I can, working some more, tidying up and cleaning the house, doing chores, eating, and then sleeping to do it over again. My colleagues seem a bit more adept at fiercely defending their personal time than I am – an issue I faced when I was working at my previous jobs as well – I kept wondering where my coworkers found time to do things like go out for cocktails or exercise regularly when there was so much work to be done.

And yet, here I am, writing about productivity and motivation and organization on a daily basis, and how important it is to go home from work and leave work at work, and how important it is to have work/life balance, and how great it is to be organized, and I have yet to apply many of those principles to my own life. Some of it is because I do what I love, but a lot of it is because it’s just really damned hard to do, really damned easy to read about, and not that hard to write about either. When I crack that nut though, I’ll have a hell of a feature to write.

If anyone has any insight on that one, let me know.

Maybe I need to do some traveling again.

I tend not to, aside from visiting my father on a regular basis, but those days in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Francisco were some of the most inspiring and creative I’ve had. I need to find a way to make those things happen again, one way or the other. Ever since I was a child, visiting new places and seeing new things have been immensely magical for me – my years living in Europe shaped me in that regard, I suppose.

Maybe Europe. See some of the things I saw as a child. I should add that to the list, I think. Winter’s usually a good time to travel, as long as it’s not over the peak holiday times. Then again, there’s always cruises, trains, and cars for more nearby destinations.

I’m awfully introspective for someone who really is by all accounts relatively happy. I mean, I’ve made a point to start exercising again like I did back in the day, I’m eating better, taking care of myself, and I have a great job and a wonderful living situation. Perhaps it’s a matter of melancholy happiness, if that’s not an oxymoron. Maybe I’m just having a hard time letting myself be really happy. Hell, maybe I just need an ice cream.

In any event, it’s time to pay more attention to my pet projects and personal needs. I think I can make the time it. Besides, I do owe it to myself.

It’s been unfortunately long, I have to admit. A lot has happened, and even more hasn’t, so I won’t complain very much. I hope you won’t either. To that end, I’ve been sitting with my arms deep in hacked WordPress installs, partially due to old and outdated themes and now-defunct plugins that I allowed to stay active and installed when I should have deactivated them a long time ago. Part of me had hoped to go ahead and try some new themes on my blogs this weekend, but another part of me knows full well that I have a hell of a time deciding what themes to apply to what blogs, and then have little desire for all of the back-end changes I’ll have to make to header images and embedded videos to make the posts look good once the changes have been made. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but could never really muster the effort to. Maybe eventually. I really just haven’t seen any WordPress themes lately that spark my fancy enough to really want to implement them. If anyone has suggestions though, I’d love to hear them.

I will say this though, Lifehacker has my hands full, so much so that I’ve been neglecting my other sites. I do hope to turn that around a bit soon though. After all, I come across tons of great articles and stories every day that aren’t a good fit for Lifehacker, but they’re still great stories. I’m glad to have somewhere else to share them, and I’m not ready to just give that up yet.

In any event, things have been settling down and stabilizing a bit in the past few months. I really wish I could take a vacation, and I suppose I really could, but not without a pretty significant bit of preparation–enough that I’d have to plan pretty carefully. Carefully enough that I haven’t bothered putting it in just yet. I’m in a weird place where I have a lot of things that I really want to do–have been meaning to do–but just not enough hours in the day. I should probably make a better, more comprehensive list of the things I want to do. For some reason, I can’t tell if I’m just too busy, low on willpower or energy, or just need to muster up the drive to get started. Either way, I should probably figure it out.

It’s not as though I haven’t been up to a lot. This weekend brought me my brand new iPad-the first one I’ve owned, and a worthwhile purchase, I think. Now I just need to load it up with some apps that are worth having. I have a bunch I tested a while back, but now that I actually have one, finding a good case and a few worthwhile apps is more difficult than I anticipated. I’ve set up a bit of a musical outpost over at This Is My Jam, if you guys would like to join, or are curious what I’ve been listening to these days. Aside from that, apparently I have a lot to do. I would say wish me luck, but I think I’ve played that card a time or two before.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time. Pondering how exactly I’m going to approach it, what I was going to say. It’s been a while, obviously, but that’s not the reason I’ve hesitated. Let’s get some of this stuff out of the way first, okay?

My mother’s health has been iffy for several months now, and while things were largely okay through November, she and my father made the decision to stop the chemotherapy she had been on for the past year or so because it was getting too difficult for her to move from first her chair, and then eventually from her bed. Shortly after that decision, her health began to deteriorate–not unexpected, but still–and finally on December 13th I got the call that “it could be any time now,” and that I should be there as soon as possible. My mother greeted me when I arrived later that evening, we sat together and talked for a while, and eventually she fell asleep. From there she hung on, in and out of coherent consciousness, until Friday the 16th, when she heaved one last sigh of relief and passed away, out of this world and on to the next.

Before we go too much further, it’s worth noting that I’ve never lost anyone super-close to me. I’ve heard of old friends passing away at untimely young ages, far off relatives who had died, family of friends, things like that. My mother’s funeral would be the first one I would have to sit through, and I had to sit through it up front. Her internment was, thankfully, not as dramatic as I had feared it would be, but still the first I’d ever been to.

I’ll fondly remember our Thanksgiving-one of the last times we had family surrounding us and all talked together as though there were nothing going on–in fact, even in her last days my mother would tell everyone she was “doing fine” when asked, and she her strength is something I can only hope to channel when it’s my turn to go.

All of this happening so close to Christmas would normally cast a long shadow over the holiday, and it did, but my mother wouldn’t have approved if my father and I sat around feeling sad and sorry for our loss. We miss her, we miss her terribly, but my mother wasn’t one to have anyone mourn her. “If you didn’t cry for me in life, don’t cry for me in death,” she said.

So we did have Christmas–Raevyn and I visited my father for the long weekend, traded gifts, made a delicious Christmas dinner. In fact, it was the first Christmas dinner I’d ever had to cook inside and out. We started the afternoon with curried crab dip and steamed shrimp, and moved on to prep dinner. We roasted a fat, seven pound chicken, made sweet potatoes, sauteed squash, made kale, and sipped wine, and it was lovely. Obviously the table was short a person, but it was a beautiful evening regardless. My extended family, all of whom had come from miles around to attend my mother’s funeral, went out of their way to give us a few gifts here and there to make sure we had a Christmas, and they were all lovely.

When Raevyn and I returned home, on Monday evening, we had our own Christmas, and suffice to say that we went ahead and spoiled each other, partially because we had to do all of our shopping after my mother passed away, getting deliveries to the apartment the week before Christmas, when Raevyn had to go back to work and I had to attend to funeral and internment arrangements. All of the gifts are unwrapped and the wrapping paper is tossed away, and our home is full of books, anime DVDs, Portal 2 related gear, cable management tools, and a new coffee mug that looks a lot like the ones used for sipping Raktajino on Deep Space Nine, among other awesome gifts.

Frankly, I’ve been so busy these past few weeks and so drained otherwise that I haven’t had time to post pictures of any of it – or any of the other photos I’ve taken since I got my shiny new Sony NEX-5N a while back. The photos are on the SD card, I just haven’t plugged the camera–or the SD card–into my computer to have them copied. I think part of it is that I use a Mac to write every day, and at the end of the day I switch over to my Windows PC for browsing and gaming, so I’m stuck trying to figure out which system (and which app on that system) would be best for managing my photos. I’ve usually gone for just a folder system I keep organized myself in Windows, but I’ve been pondering giving up and letting Picasa manage my photos in Windows (since it’s already installed) or iPhoto manage them on the Mac. We’ll see. Either way, I’d love to get them up at my Flickr account sometime soon.

All of that aside, the holidays treated me well, all things considered, I’m thankful to the team at Lifehacker for keeping an eye out for me while I was running around dealing with issues that kept me from the keyboard, and even more thankful for the love and support from Raevyn and the friends I’ve been able to talk to about this up to this point. I know as soon as I post this there’ll be more of you, and I’m grateful for you as well.

For now though, I have plenty of work to get back into, a new year to look forward to, and a lot to do even between now and the beginning of the new year. I have some freshening up to do, both virtually and in my physical space, and I’ll need all of the luck I can get. Here’s looking forward to 2012.

A number of things have happened recently to remind me of the time passing. Obviously one of them was my birthday yesterday, an always curious reminder of my actual age and the progression of time. Others have been the passing of Steve Jobs, which I’ve written about at The Classy Geek and Dennis Ritchie in recent weeks. Still more was the half-asleep realization that a year ago I was wistfully wishing that someday I’d be able to make my passion a full-time job. More specifically, I thought to myself: “Man, I wish I could get paid to read my favorite blogs on the internet and then write about the cool stuff that I find.”

Yeah. How about that? Pretty incredible how that turned out.

That said, it’s not like it’s easy work – I have to keep reminding myself that sometimes doing the things that you love is often very difficult work to do: it’s hard, but if I had to trade it for getting up in the morning and putting on business casual clothes and heading off in my car for a long drive to an office I didn’t want to go to every day, I don’t think I could. I’m pretty happy doing what I do now, and frankly, I’d like to keep it up as long as possible.

That said, my birthday itself was lovely, as was the weekend prior, and hopefully as will be this week and the weekend coming up. At the same time, I do have a tendency to get a little melancholy on my birthday, and wonder whether or not I’m spending the time as well as I possibly can. Every year, my birthday winds up making me wonder whether I am where I want to be, whether I’m spending my time the way I want to be. In fact, as I was drifting off to sleep, I asked Raevyn whether or not she thought I was making the best use of my limited time: reaching for my dreams and living the life I want to live in my head.

After all, I’ve come a long way in a short period of time. I’m living in the city like I’ve always wanted to, I’m writing about technology and lifestyle like I’ve always wanted to, I’m pretty much exactly the person I’ve always wanted to be, with some caveats, of course.

And of course, as with any caveat, I summarily obsess over whether or not I’m making enough rapid progress towards addressing those caveats. Am I working out fast enough? Am I eating right? I need to make more time to exercise, and get out of the house and try new restaurants. I need to clean up my budget and tweak my finances. I need to unpack the apartment. It goes on and on and on. Part of me knows full well that list will never expire, I’ll never be able to exhaust it, but that knowledge doesn’t minimize my need to try. It’s a strength and a weakness, I suppose.

To that point though, I’m desperately on the lookout for a new and better productivity system. I love ReQall, but it’s often too difficult to get tasks in and out of the tool, and I get the distinct feeling that the service is on life support because the developers and support staff have been impressively quiet with regard to new features, updates and improvements, and even questions from users on their own support forums. It might be time to move on, and I’m definitely the kind of person who can benefit from a good task management system – I remember when I started using ReQall; I started being more productive just so I could use it. If you have suggestions, send them my way.

Heck, if you have any suggestions for getting out of a rut and getting in gear, send them my way. I’d hesitate to say I’m in a rut, specifically, but I definitely need to find a way to harness a little more energy and fire on a few more cylinders than I am. That may be saying a lot, since saying I’m busy is an understatement. Still: smarter, not harder – more rewarding, not just more – is my goal.

I’m woefully missing the catharsis here. One of the things about taking your passion and making it your day job is that sometimes you still need a break from your passion when you do it enough: which means that I need more opportunities away from a keyboard than I’d like to admit that I do. Might be time to pick up another hobby-or at least hit the gym more often. It’s not like we didn’t move into this building partially because there was one on the first floor, free to residents. Working from home should give me plenty of time to drop in for a half-hour workout, right? Right?

In the time since I’ve started working full time at Lifehacker, I’ve written more than I thought I ever would, researched more than I ever thought I would, read more horrible stories and DIY projects gone horribly wrong than I ever thought I would, and waded through more self-entitled commenters and attention-hungry PR reps than I ever thought I would. And for the most part, I love it – all of it. I may not love getting up as early as I do to make it all happen, but I wouldn’t trade it in to go back to a day job, commute to a cubicle, and slave away at work that I don’t find half as interesting.

To that end though, it’s been an emotional rollercoaster that I totally thought I was ready for – maybe with a few known weaknesses, but I thought I had shored up my mental and emotional defenses, knew where my weak points were, but this has been more challenging than I anticipated. There’s a reason I posted this video to Gears and Widgets, and if I said I didn’t have at least a moment a day where I wish I could force at least one person to watch it, I’d be lying. I know eventually I’ll get used to it or ignore it, and honestly I think that thicker skin is coming in, but I wish it didn’t take so long, or suck so much.

So in the past few weeks, I inherited an iPad for my ailing mother, who has a second-gen iPod Touch that’s just too small for the emailing and blogging that she’s trying to do with it. Oddly enough, using it for a few weeks while I got it ready to give to her made me want one pretty badly: not that it fills any essential need in my life–it really doesn’t–but boy is it a handy tool to have around.

I also finally upgraded my old OG Motorola Droid for a shiny new Droid Bionic – I’ve been sitting on an eligable upgrade for months now, and I’ve been waiting for the Bionic since CES in January, when the phone was the star of the show. The reviews have been largely positive, and while people note that Samsung is likely bringing a new phone to Verizon Wireless in October or November (the Galaxy Nexus or Nexus Prime, depending on who you’re listening to, and it’ll be the first phone to run Android 2.4 “Ice Cream Sandwich,”) I figured if I keep waiting and clinging to whatever the “next best thing” will be, I’ll always find myself waiting for the “next best thing.” All things considered, I love this thing – it didn’t take me too long to configure, and really appreciate the extra speed.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been buying too many toys lately (which I probably have,) I also picked up a Sony Nex-5N – my first camera that’s not on a phone since my old 5MP Pentax (which I donated before I moved last because it was on its last legs anyway) and the first one I’ve had with interchangeable lenses. It’s a powerhouse, and I’m still learning my way around it. Thankfully my colleague Adam Dachis has an excellent guide to the basics of photography that’s been a huge help so far.

To that end, maybe this Sunday I’ll take that camera to the market and do some shooting, if I can muster up the nerve. It takes a certain amount of fearlessness to take photos in public when no one else is: fearlessness that I don’t know if I have quite yet. I know a lot of people who post beautiful photographs on a regular basis, and I used to do it with my phone (until my poor OG Droid’s camera stopped working,) I’d love to be one of them again.

Anyway. Back to the real world. Things to do, places to go. Still struggling every day with living that life in my head. It keeps changing, which I suppose is what makes it beautiful. Here’s to the weekend, and here’s to you.

I almost don’t want to talk about how ridiculously busy and life-changing the past few months have been. For those of you in my personal circles, you’re aware of some of the things I’m keeping closer to my chest, but for those of you outside, you all likely know about my leaving “the day job,” where I was a full-time project manager for a large database marketing company and going full-time freelance as a technology writer….if you haven’t, you’re clued in.

Yes, that’s right – I ditched a tidy salary and benefits to go chasing my dream. It sounds so silly and awkward now that it’s done, but it was such a huge leap at the time, especially in the face of circumstances that I thought to myself were only going to get progressively intolerable, that I wasn’t sure whether things would pan out. That said, I knew full well that if they didn’t pan out, I could just as easily go back to what I was doing and find somewhere else to draw a check for something that I – while talented and skilled at it – wasn’t passionate about.

So I went full-time freelance, partially in order to take advantage of the additional work the fine folks at Lifehacker wanted me to do, and to ramp up my efforts over at Geek.com and the newly relaunched ExtremeTech. Less than a week after taking the plunge to go freelance, I was staring at a full-time job offer from Lifehacker. Apparently I’m doing something right, or at least I hope so.

I accepted, and at this point we’re still working out the details and mailing paperwork back and forth, but for all intents and purposes, I’m a full-time member of the Lifehacker crew. That’s where I am every morning, that’s where I spend the majority of my time writing, and if you follow any of my other sites, especially The Classy Geek or Gears and Widgets, you’ve noticed it in the lack of updates over there. I’m just getting into the swing of things and balancing out the work between Lifehacker and other places I tend to write, so I’m hoping to have it evened out and to be able to do my hobby writing as well soon.

All of this happened to coincide with Raevyn and I moving downtown to our dream apartment in DC, which while small is still large enough to serve as my home and my home office while I work, and gives us the urban lifestyle we both always wanted. I have to be up a little early for my tastes to cover the morning shift at Lifehacker, but I’m getting used to it – as long as I can make myself go to bed the night before.

Still, it’s lovely to be able to walk out of our apartment and less than a few steps to our trash chute (much closer than any dumpster I ever lived near) or downstairs a few flights and up a half-block to grab a burger at Five Guy’s or a sandwich at Subway (or a few light supplies at the corner CVS pharmacy.) We happen to live in new construction in a part of town filled with office buildings and a military base, so during the weekday there are tons of people mulling around and food trucks for delicious lunchtime eats. When the sun goes down there are concerts at the waterfront park a couple of blocks away. It’s a lovely neighborhood, and I’m very lucky to be in it.

Now, if only I had the time (or the organization) to manage to make use of our building’s lovely gym and spend some time getting back in shape. I’m sure it’ll all come in time. Right now, all of my energy has gone to keeping my head above water at Lifehacker and at the other venues I write for, and trying to relax on the weekends and get some rest in between the days.

That said, I should probably be abed. Morning comes quickly, and while I’m thrilled to even have the time to fill in the gaps here, I should probably be using to rest. Even so, I’m okay shaving off a few minutes here and there to write without having to do it for someone.

So then, how are you?

Remember when I was rambling on about how busy I’ve been recently? Yeah – this past week has probably taken the cake for being one of the most busy and challenging I’ve ever had, especially as a writer. In addition to writing for AppScout and Gearlog every day, I’ve also been posting at Geek.com every day. If that weren’t enough, I picked up a side gig over at Sound and Vision Magazine.

But here’s the clincher: I was invited to guest post all day today over at Lifehacker, which means I provided the entirety of today’s content there. I like to think I did well, but head over and check out today’s (Sunday the 17th, that is) posts! Your comments and thoughts are more than welcome, I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Now that it’s all over though, I have a little bit of time to breathe, relax, and think again about the move, which I’ve promptly ignored all week. We still have permits to get for the moving truck, move dates to set and schedule with the building, change of address forms to fill out, utilities to set up, and I’ve got an HTPC to set up so I don’t have to get cable television when we get into the new place.

So yes – it’s been so busy that a lot of the things I would normally spend this time worrying about – like the move and my day job – have gone by the wayside. I’m glad to be able to pay attention to them again – I like having a headstart on tasks, especially if they’ll only be in the next few months.

At the same time, and as much as I’ve noted that it’s been a busy and challenging week, I can also happily say that I’ve loved it all. In fact, the only thing that’s crossed my mind is wondering when I’ll be in a position to leave my day job behind and do this all of the time. I think I might be looking forward to it.