Hey, all. Sorry to disappear. I was feeling a bit cranky about waiting on stuff. I hate waiting. Yeah, I know: Life is a journey, not a destination. Doesn't mean that I like the parts spent sitting around in bus stations.

Ah, I feel dumb even complaining about it. Which is probably why I haven't posted in a while. It seemed pointless to come on here and whinge that the company I really want to work for still hasn't gotten around to notifying me if they want to give me a job or not or that the guys I did the proposal writing job for still have not paid me or responded to my e-mail about getting together to talk about the additional work that they allegedly wanted me to do (I'll phone them Monday and see what's up) or that I have an unusual number (for me, anyway) of short stories inching their way into triple digit response times.

Hardly an overwhelming list of woes. It's probably not helped by the general pattern of life lately, where I go from being stressed one week because I'm too busy and have too much to deal with to being cranky the next because I have too much free time in which to worry about things that are beyond my control.

But really, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad.

Anyway, all this waiting makes me feel restless, which means that I've been wandering around Berkeley a lot. Have been spending a lot of time sitting in coffeehouses. Have gotten a fair amount of writing done, which is good, though I'm starting to worry that I'm training myself to only be able to write in coffeehouses.

Well, I suppose if it happens, I can always untrain myself again.

My workspace at home here is getting a little unmanageably cluttered. The task of keeping materials for job searching, fiction writing, freelance projects, technical writing classes, and other miscellaneous projects for personal amusement and enrichment organized and accessible is taxing my available space and organizational acumen.

Basically, all this stuff keeps spreading out and colonizing my available workspace, converting it to storage space. So, if I'm working on something where it's actually useful to be able to spread a bunch of stuff out, I end up going to Starbucks and grabbing one of those library tables. (I'm more than half convinced that what Starbucks really sells is not the beverage - what they really sell is the rental of a place to sit in relatively quiet and pleasant surroundings for an hour or so. The drink is just a perk.)

Anyway, I keep fantasizing to myself that the solution to this problem is a bigger and better desk. To some extent, this is true -- when I purchased this desk about 7 years ago, I theorized that if I got a desk with no drawers, I wouldn't end up with messy desk drawers full of crap. This was absolutely true. I have no desk drawers full of crap. I have a desktop piled with crap.

Basically, I had hold of a half of the truth there: Stuff expands to fill the space available. The second half: If you don't make space available for Stuff, Stuff will find space. It will sail out in little Stuff galleons, land in virgin territory, plant the flag and read a proclamation claiming the land in the name of Stuff. And it really doesn't care if you think you already live there.

At that point, your options are basically either all out war, or going down to Office Depot and getting another one of those cool Rubbermaid Spacemaker boxes.

But I still fantasize about getting a bigger desk.

So, like, I was going to tell you about this book I've been reading about Pontiac's War, but I seem to have gotten the Chippewa warriors confused with a bunch of sticky notes and a package of binder clips, and Detroit with my desk.