Yes, I'm Still Alive. Thanks For Asking.

Well, one of the things I've learned since starting this blog is how it utterly changes your relationship with the world around you and your friends at large.

In the old days, if I was under a really tight deadline or just wasn't feeling terribly social for whatever reason or had been snowed in to the rafters, with the house surrounded by ravenous wolves, I could just vanish into the woodwork for a time to pop my head back up, groundhog-like, when circumstances had changed for the better. Now that I have this here blog, if I should fail to post anything new for a few days (or, okay, I'll admit it, a whole month this time), many of you Gentle Readers out there start writing in, concerned about my general well being, afraid that I may have somehow contracted Death Cooties or the like and am sprawled senseless beneath my desk, unable to gasp for help.

If it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not. In point of fact, I find it extraordinarily comforting to know that, should my lovely wife Christine ever be out of town for an extended period, and if I were to contract Death Cooties while she was gone, there are so many of you out there who would notice my absence. Not that you could do anything about it, of course.

I mean, really, Death Cooties are incredibly contagious, and you'd have to break into my house past my state-of-the-art security system just to check if I was under my desk, and most of you don't even live locally to begin with, so you'd have to drive here all the way from wherever or buy airline tickets and then go through hours of aggravation with stupid airport security just to get on the plane, and by then, by the time you finally got here, I'd probably already be dead of the Cooties anyway.

But thanks for the thought.

The truth of the matter is that I really have been under a tight deadline for the past month. I'm in the final stretch of writing an incredibly cool video game that I really wish I could tell you all about, but promise I will once I'm legally able to. I've also been spending a lot of time dealing with the declining health of my beloved old Golden Retriever Muffin, about whom I've written here a time or two before. At the age of thirteen-and-a-half, rather old for a dog her size, she's become somewhat senile, extremely arthritic, and occasionally incontinent, a horrible hat trick for such a sweet-hearted friend. So I give her her medicines, scratch her loving head, and keep a watchful eye on her, hoping for the best as time goes by.

I have made the time over the past month to catch all of the new summer blockbuster movies (with the singular exception of Sex and the City, since I never watched the series) and I'll try to post my opinions of same over the next few days, should any of you out there actually care what I have to think about them. The lovely wife and I also caught a test screening last night of the new Viggo Mortensen/Ed Harris/Renee Zellwegger western Appaloosa, which Christine covers in more detail over on her own entertaining blog which can be read by clicking on the appropriate link to the right.

Beyond that, I'll try to show up here more regularly, if for no other reason than to relieve your collective concerns. Yes, I know I've promised that in the past, but good intentions have got to count for something.

Oh, and if it'll make you all sleep any easier, just yesterday I got inoculated against Death Cooties, so now all we have to worry about are the ravenous wolves.