Been talking a lot to Mom lately. It's been entertaining, enlightening and insightful. Recurring topics include worries, fears and disappointments.

Today, Mom reminded me, once again, that "it's never as bad as you think it is. Face your fears. You'll find that they're a lot smaller than had you imagined."

Driving home down 101 some time last week, I head the quote on the radio,

"Never put off writing an essay when a few words will do."

I think that statement is brilliant. I have so many notes to myself to write this or that great grandios post or essay, each guaranteed to take at least an hour or two to write. Notes to write works that are never written. Sometimes the moment is lost. Sometimes the task is overwhelmining.

Worse, sometimes a few words will do, and they don't get written.

I don't want a link blog. I like the ones I read, but don't want to be another "me, too" link site (well, not until I get the mirroring/caching module written, anyway) with stale 404 links. Ugh.

So, yeah, a few words here and there, to keep track of what's going on in life, so that I remember and laugh at myself, at how lost I was at this point while thinking how found I am.

Summary:

Wow.

Details:

Kris missed practice today. He's been working brutal hours for the last month and a half, and let me know he wasn't going to be at practice tonight either. I dropped Mike, Kate, Liza and Maeryn (hmmm... need to start calling that girl Maen, so that she has a four letter [nick]name like the rest of the family) off at the airport, drove to the office, and tried very, very hard to get the work done that I needed to get done.

I soon discovered there's a reason Mike is always stressed.

He has too much work to do.

We need to raise our rates. Clearly if we're this busy, it's because we're not charging enough. This level of work is insane for one person, much less the work of two for one person. Crazy.

So, late afternoon, my brain was fried, and I needed to leave if I was going to make practice on time. When I arrived home, I was too tired to do much more than wander to my bedroom to collapse and sleep for a couple hours. As I was collapsing, Heather (recall: best roommate EVER!) asked me if I was going to practice. She had the choice of heading to practice and play ultimate, or go a running workout, where she would just run, run, run. What fun is that? Running without a disc? Bah.

She rallyed me from my near-nap, and off we went to practice. The team was working on a horizontal stack. Contrasting to the previous three practices combined, I touched the disc a lot in the scrimmages at practice and had a really good time. I didn't think the stack explanations were so great, but I did okay, past experience clearly helping.

The biggest help, I think, was the iron supplements I've been taking. Instead of thinking, I. am. so. out. of. shape, I was able to work on ultimate, instead of noticing my legs, my lungs, my chest. Absolutely wonderful to be able to concentrate on the right things.

Kris was home when I returned. We dashed out to Hawaiian BBQ for dinner (Mmmmmmmm!), and went back home to eat. At the restaurant, Kris noticed I wasn't wearing my rings, and commented on them. I replied they were on my desk, I didn't want to play with them on, and the desk is the approved location for my rings when I remove them at home. I thought the question odd, as he removes his ring, too, but hey, I was spending time with him, he wasn't at work, so, yay!

After eating, I told Kris actually, I had to work, expecting him to be working this evening, so I committed to some work. He said, okay, did I want to work in the office? Nah, I wanted to be near him. Okay. So, I started working in the livingroom, and he watched TV for a bit. After a while, he said he wanted to play his (computer) game, so I stood up to move to the office.

When I opened the office door, the first thing I thought was, uh oh, something plastic has melted. The room smelled slightly of plastic, and my fear was the room was too warm during the day and something had melted. When I turned on the light and looked up, however, I realized just how wrong I was:

First thing I did after screaming and thanking Kris for it?

I licked it.

Went to communal dinner tonight. Mike leaves tomorrow morning, so I'm not completely sure spending four hours socializing will help my stress levels over the next few days.

Christina made a wonderful cold pasta sauce, which was good on Chookie and Martha's homemade pasta. The house is getting really good at making pasta (the kitchen aid pasta maker attachment being key to the growing talent). Christina set the pasta theme, so I volunteered to make tiramisu. Having not made tiramisu in nearly eight years, my tiramisu making skills are, uh, rusty, and, well, a little disasterous.

That, and I haven't made tiramisu for more than 6 people before. The ingredients I recall using before appararently were a fad, disappearing from the grocery shelves as the fickle fashion of coffee drinkers changes. I couldn't find some of the espresso crystals I used before, so substituted instant coffee, which was much stronger than I realized.

Basically, if you didn't like coffee, this tiramisu sucked. I soaked the lady fingers much too long (out of practice, clearly), and didn't have enough cocoa flavor. A third of the tiramisu was left uneaten. Sigh.

Mirabelle was at dinner, dressed all cute and yellow like her mom (who is always cute, but only sometimes dressed yellow). Mirabelle was carded at the door, and produced her California issued ID card, which she had dressed up for in her Swedish best. The best part was that the ID had highlighted "21 in 2027".

Ugh.

2027.

And I'll remember today in 2027 and think, "Ugh. 2006."

Megan and I talked a bit about pins, and she said she was inspired. She mentioned the pin I had foisted upon her reminds her of me, so it's just like my pins (that I've kept). Whoo!

We talked about the 100 custom pins for $10, and thought it would be great fun for the communal dinner group to make them. So, Kris, Heather and I will be hosting dinner next week, with all sorts of paper stuff for pins. Fun!

Across the Drupal developer list, an email came across two days ago:

> ...
> The current Module Developers Guide is a great start.  But misses some
> of the details that make everything "click" for a new Drupal coder.

In the Drupal handbook, there is a great resource called "Creating
modules - a tutorial":

http://drupal.org/node/17914

Needs to be updated in places (was written for 4.5), but despite this,
it still does an excellent job of teaching you the basics of Drupal
module development. Grokking the menu callback system, and its central
role as the foundation of almost any page request in Drupal, is
probably the biggest challenge for new developers. Also a challenge is
getting your head around the "hook magic", and how all of that
actually works, and then understanding a few of the more important
hooks in detail (e.g. hook_block, hook_help, hook_nodeapi). This
tutorial will help you to at least begin to overcome these challenges.

Given that I wrote that tutorial, the email gave me warm fuzzies.