I started this site back up a little over a year ago. I posted a bunch of really, really long things, then they got shorter. Then they got more and more intermittent. Then I posted a few photos. Then well, not much.

The last three and a half years have been, let’s say, eventful. And that’s led to a certain amount of stress for anybody who has even the slightest inkling of the world around them. I figured I could try to focus my attention elsewhere by writing more and playing more video games. It worked for a while, but at a certain point, I just don’t want to do anything.

I worked a lot starting last summer. Placing all my attention on work lets me feel like I’m being productive when really I’m just occupying my brain. In the absence of something to focus on, my brain would simply eat itself. The thing about working crazy hours is that there’s usually a way out of it. I’m in a position where I should have simply committed to less work. Some people might just have to push back. But once I was committed, I was committed.

It took months of nights and weekends, supported by a few great coworkers who do way more than I would ever actually expect of them, but I actually got through it. That’s not to say I survived, but that the work was actually completed. I got it done, and it felt good. And, it all wrapped up just days before the holidays.

I took a full two weeks off of work over the holidays and did everything I could to not think about work. It was pretty nice. During that whole time, I didn’t really do much of anything, which was kind of an achievement for me. Of course, I was putting off tons of responsibilities and projects around the house, but it was still a nice feeling.

Work became a little more manageable, with lots of interesting and fulfilling projects in the pipeline. I started slowly getting things done around the house too. I bought a NAS, and used it to replace an ancient, 13-year-old iMac that had been called into duty as a server. New year, new me. It was a nice feeling.

But then that thing happened. It started small, as a trickle of stories, and eventually got big, affecting literally all of us.

All that work I had been doing? It was a couple of web sites for conferences run by my work. The first of them was cancelled about 36 hours before it was supposed to start. The site did manage to serve almost its entire purpose, but it was still disappointing to see the event get cancelled. I had been planning to attend to start doing some important research that would have been a huge benefit for all those fun projects in the pipeline.

So here we are. It’s a new world, and we’re all just living in our houses in it. This will be week five. It honestly hasn’t been bad. I don’t have the slightest desire to kill anyone, and I’m like 75 percent sure the rest of my family feels the same way about me. Right from the start, I got big ideas. All that stuff I wanted to do last year — more writing and more video games — was at the top of my list.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I came up with tons of other things that were just more pressing. Frankly, they were things that would benefit the rest of the household in some way, which may be why they’re not in a hurry to kill me. But the feasible items on the big list are getting done, and it’s getting closer to the “watching the shows I want to binge” end of things. Somewhere on that list is still “write more and play more video games,” and I’m getting started on it now. Maybe.