House Tearmainn

It’s not unusual for me to be completely swamped in one area of my life at a time, two is a bit less likely, but recently I’ve been going full-bore on four different fronts. The effect isn’t much of a surprise… I’m not doing particularly well at any of them. Still, I wanted to take a few minutes before we run off to MsC to post an update for the couple of you who kindly check in here now and again.

My job is voracious, and I could easily let it eat my life whole. So far I have resisted that, but we are getting right into launch season and we have some HUGE projects wrapping up. Since I’ve been here less than a year I’m not essential staff of any of these things, though I bet next year will be a different animal.

The kids are growing and changing and prepping for another school year. It’s hard to believe the littlest is starting grade school. School was hard on us last year, and I’m mentally steeling myself for an epic battle to really engage the eldest in her school efforts this year.

Things with pais have been fluctuating pretty wildly recently. We acknowledged a while back that the NRE (new relationship energy) had wound down after an amazingly long run and that we have fallen into a few different levels of rut and bad behavior.  More than ever we need this year’s MsC to have time to reconnect and really dive into the lifestyle in ways that life just isn’t permitting at home.

The fourth front is a project I’ve been working on since we returned from last MsC, and that I promised myself I would have done for this year. It’s a M/s community web site called M/s Sanctuary, and I think I have managed to drag it’s lifeless corpse over the finish line. I’ve enjoyed working on it, but my obsessive focus on projects has certainly added to the stress around the house.

My intention was to unleash this beast of a site on an unsuspecting (and likely ambivalent) MsC this year, but I’m having some second thoughts on it. In order to get it out the door, I had to chop off several features that I felt were important to the overall mission of the site. I’ve also invited a number of people to come check it out and I think the reception has been lukewarm at best. Though I know these things take some time to warm up and a few of the right people can really engage folks. Right now I’m just not sure that things are quite ready for a critical mass of people to join in.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a flyer on CD that I’ll be taking with me, so if it seems like there’s interest I can have a few run off and see where things go. Either way, we desperately need this vacation and I can’t wait to get it started!

This year’s Master/slave Conference was another amazing and transformative experience for both myself and pais. Like last year, it was more than a little overwhelming. We came away from it with so much to think about and discuss it’s hard to know where to begin.

I spent a fair portion of our return trip meditating on simply how to organize the thoughts and discussions that need to happen as we digest all of these wonderful new ideas. One of the recurring themes in my thoughts while processing this year is that I need to be writing more. What better way to kick that off than to once again use this blog as a vehicle for sorting out my thoughts and feelings on these topics, as well as sharing some of the concepts with the larger world*?

So it is that I return to the world of blogging with a commitment to keep up with writing at least one post a day, even if it doesn’t get posted that day. Even if it just says, “Lousy day, lost ground and don’t want to talk about it.”

Last year we returned with all of this excitement and energy, and I let it dwindle and eventually dissipate. This year, today, right now, I am making the commitment to keep the fire tended and to use what we have learned to our fullest potential. Let’s see if I’m up to the task.

In other news, this looked much longer when being written on the iPod. I suspect this either means that I’ll have a lot of short posts (not necessarily a bad thing) or that I’ll have to find another way to write while out and about.

_{* By “larger world” I mean the Googlebot since it really is the only visitor this site ever gets. I’m ok with that, actually.}