I Know, I Know…

Why yes, I do remember that I have a blog.

So why haven’t I been posting anything to it? Well, I should think that if a poor memory isn’t the explanation, that would be easy to figure out: sheer laziness.

Besides, not that much has been going on anyway. Same old, same old. Work, inject insulin, sleep, work, inject insulin…

My sugar levels have been pretty good for a while now, though I attribute that almost entirely to the insulin, because most of the time it doesn’t seem like the diet and exercise thing is having much of an impact.

On the other hand, I have lost about 20 pounds since this whole thing started. It’s a noticeable difference, and I look a lot slimmer. Until I sit down, at which point my stomach juts out like I’m six months pregnant.

Still, I am getting some comments from people who have noticed the weight loss, so I guess that’s good.

I know that, on the rare occasions on which I post, I keep making a reference to launching a new regular feature, but so far it hasn’t materialized. It will, it’s just something that’s going to involve a fair amount of pain, so I need to mentally prepare myself before diving in.

A while back I finally got around to reading Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which is exactly how it sounds: it’s Pride & Prejudice…with zombies.

It was entertaining enough – up next is Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters – but I kind of found myself confused on a couple of points regarding the book.

First off is the introduction in which the author – no, not Jane Austen, the guy who added in all of the zombie stuff – talks about his immediate thought when the idea was pitched to him. Basically his mind immediately conjured up images of Regency-era Englishwomen fighting zombies in the style of Kung Fu movies.

Really? That’s where your mind immediately went? Because while those aspects were entertaining, I wouldn’t have automatically connected Kung Fu to zombies.

The other thing, and this goes beyond just the book, is the widespread nerd enthusiasm for the concept, and the current zombie obsession that’s so prevalent among nerds. When did zombies become such an essential aspect of nerdom? Is it because of video games? Whatever the case, I hadn’t previously realized that my bespectacled brethren were so enamored with the undead, and would have never predicted the relatively recent explosion of shambling, flesh and brain-munching corpses in popular culture.

I guess I just didn’t have my thumb on the pulse of nerdom, though honestly, who can blame me? I mean, who wants to touch a nerd? They’re all unwashed and sticky and covered in Cheeto dust.

My birthday is coming up on Tuesday. Whoop-de-freakin’- do.

However, it did give an excuse to take the day off (as well as the day before), so there’s that much going for it anyway.

In any case, I just thought I should post something. This time around I’m not going to bother promising to try to post more regularly.

"Exciting" New Regular Feature...Prepare To Yawn

So my meeting today wasn’t as long – or painful – as I’d anticipated, though the painlessness was mostly due to the fact that it didn’t last as long as anticipated.
It was originally scheduled to go from 10:30 to 5:00, but some of the participants had a delayed flight, so we didn’t start until 11:30, and it only lasted until about 3:30.
Now, if only we’d actually accomplished something…
When I got home from work I decided to mow the lawn. I didn’t bother saying anything about the bugs that were dive bombing my eyes to the Universe this time around.
I probably could have gotten away with putting off mowing for a few more days, as the grass in the front and side wasn’t really that long, but the grass in the back was all wild and unkempt, so I figured I might as well.
(I just realized; until I mowed it, my yard had a mullet.)
When Scott and Stacy stopped to get tickets for The Dark Knight in IMAX yesterday, they found that it was sold out, so they ended up buying tickets for a Friday night show at the regular theater.
In the meantime, Scott had signed up some free tickets to a Thursday screening at work, and had asked me if I wanted to go with him if he got the tickets, then rescinded the offer, as Stacy, who had no interest in going to the Friday show, decided that she wanted to go to that.
He said that he was sorry to dangle that offer in front of me and then snatch it away, then noted that he’d said “dangle.”
I pointed out that he also said “snatch,” then said, “Is it revelatory that I focused on snatch, while you focused on dangle? Yes. I think it is.”
In any case, Jamie also scored some tickets to the Thursday show, but was not able to find a babysitter so that Casey could go, so she told Scott that I was welcome to go as her guest.
Earlier today Scott e-mailed me to let me know that Neil Gaiman will be at this year’s National Book Festival and that we should go. I agreed, and forwarded his e-mail on to my friend Eric, suggesting that he might also like to go.
It turns out that the Festival is on his wife’s birthday and that she’s thrilled at the prospect of meeting Neil on her birthday, so his response was “97% Yup.”
So that’ll be cool.
I’d posted a MySpace bulletin about the Heroic Portraits update, and in his e-mail to me Eric mentioned that he liked the Gallery and wanted to know if, in regards to Heroic Portraits, I was “getting any love.”
In response, I said, “And no, just like everywhere else, I'm not getting any love on Heroic Portraits.”
Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten hit with the whole “You’re so quiet” thing a few times.
There’s really not much I can say to that (appropriately enough), but I have been thinking about some of the reasons why I am so quiet, and I thought I’d make the exploration of those reasons something of a regular feature here.
So here we have our first installment:

Why is Jon So Quiet?
Because I don’t get much practice talking.
There have been periods in my life in which I’ve gone days without saying a word. Generally, the length of such periods depended on whether or not I needed to stock up on beer and cigarettes, and even then all I’d end up saying is “A pack of Marlboro Lights,” and “Thanks.”
Even now, I don’t have much cause to talk once I get home from work, and the odds are that even before I left work I’d probably been sitting in my cube working on something and not talking to anyone.
So, yeah. Most of my time is spent without having anyone to talk to, so when the opportunity to talk presents itself, I’m not really inclined to take advantage of it, because the odds are that, unaccustomed as I am to speaking, my voice will be hoarse, I’ll stammer or misspeak, or I’ll go off on some rambling, incoherent tangent that has nothing to do with anything.
And I prefer to safe my rambling, incoherent tangents that have nothing to with anything for my Threshold entries.