Wednesday, December 6, 2000

 

12:55 p.m. This is what we call: Good Intentions. I'm starting to write while the sun's still up. Interruptions will ensue, but at least I've started.

It's a booming time around here. In the olden days I sometimes rattled through the empty house with my own thoughts as my only companions. It was a creative, if somewhat isolated life. Occasionally Igor would work a few hours at home, requiring a little extra kitchen cleanup, you know -- but nothing too stressful.

All that's changed, at least for the nones. Where I used to have a quiet library in the front of the house, there is now an office for young men who are on a Quest for Fire to strike. They sometimes eat in healthy ways and whoop it up on the phone and they sometimes snack on greasy chips and do high-fives and throw things at each other.

Needless to say. Needless to say. Just a tad frazzled here.

I'm all the way at the other end of the house, past the kitchen and around the corner from the microwave and it beeps throughout the day. Sometimes I make more coffee and get to it in time; sometimes it's been bubbling in the carafe for a few hours without me. I drink as much as I can.

Naps have become a somewhat sneaky affair because I am, I have to tell you, still quite ashamed that I take them. That I need them. Desire them and long for them and look forward to them. Love love love them!

Oh, it's all very business-like and above-board. Because I tend to work late into the night, I need that extra sleeping time fair and square. A couple of quality hours in the mid-to-late afternoon and I'm good to go for a whole new working day once the dinner dishes are in the machine and warm sudsy water is sloshing out the pernicious coffee rings.

I have an extensive collection of coffee mugs, thank the good Lord and all those anonymous conference planners who believe that advertising works. I'm drinking from an Experian mug right this minute. Just to be fair, I checked out their website and dang if I still don't know what they do.

I'm sure one day a year or so ago I stood and listened to their sales pitch, politely, while clutching my much-desired and valuable freebie mug, but I have no memory of that moment. I just know it had to have happened or I wouldn't now have the mug.

Their site is the typical minimalist big-swirl big-bucks kind of place with secret rollovers off-limits to Mac people, as differentiated from the more mundane thousand-tab, multistacked-multicolored-column, forever-to-load busy busy business kind. Ok. Duty done. Mug earned.

I am, of course, in the process of trying to create one of those all-purpose multi-everything biz sites myself. We, as a company, are going to make the huge leap from merely packaging books to actually publishing (and thus: selling) books.

It's a steepish, expensive learning curve and a trip through acronym hell: php, RDBMS, SQL, and you know the rest. Donate the quiet part of your house to those who can help you run the business. Round up all those stray hours and throw 'em in the shopping cart and enter the Check-Out Zone.

No need to panic and no need to rush. Everything's under control.

Rod Serling will be handing out the customary mugs.