Wow, I’m posting something in this blog. Surprise! Hello.

You may recall that back at the beginning of the year I made a promise to myself (and to you! yes, you) that I would take 15 minutes out of my lunch break each day to post a small article here, or store up some words toward a larger, multi-day post. Clearly that hasn’t happened, primarily because I made some other promises to myself at the beginning of the year. One of them — to improve my health — has superseded the others and, it turns out, is mutually incompatible with the blogging plan I laid out.

A big part of my health efforts involves those “better food choices” you always hear about, and unfortunately that means instead of slapping a sandwich in the grill at lunch I’ve taken to eating fresh salads every day. The process of chopping up ingredients for a good salad, I’m afraid, fills those 15 minutes I had allotted to myself for blogging. Those avocados and peppers and cucumbers aren’t going to slice themselves, you know.

I admittedly took a half-hearted approach to getting back into shape for the first three months of the year, eating only somewhat more cautiously and thinking frequently about how I should exercise more (though without actually converting intent into action). Then, sometime in April, there came a day in which I found myself at the hospital to provide moral support as my wife’s cousin made her first visits to the oncologist, and while I was there received emails from a friend who was being harassed online, and then a phone call from my mother letting me know my father had been admitted to the emergency room with what appeared to be a severe heart problem. (It wasn’t, and he’s fine. So’s the friend. And the cousin-in-law has had an incredibly successful chemotherapy regimen.) Anyway, everything was fine until a minor crisis popped up at work the next afternoon and suddenly all the stress of the previous day caught up with me. I became lightheaded and realized I could hear the sound of my heart beating in my ears. I followed up on a suspicion and checked my blood pressure to find it was somewhere between “heart attack” and “fire hose.”

I figured it might be cool not to die young, so that was when I decided to get my act together, even if it meant letting this poor blog crumble into dust. So it goes. I may have squandered a website I worked hard on for a decade and a half, but I’ve lost a bunch of weight and have pretty healthy blood pressure again, so that’s good. Plus, the 50 minutes I spend on my elliptical machine each day before lunch has taken me through all the X-Men and Pixar movies as well as the first season of Star Trek. It’s nice to consume media for non-work purposes; I’d forgotten what it was like.

Another factor behind GameSpite’s hiatus: Trying to wrap up overdue obligations. I’ve made a lot of progress, even if it’s been slower than I’d hoped. For example, I finished up my portions of the Retronauts Kickstarter DVD over the weekend, at long last. I’ve completed several individual commissions, too. I still have some outstanding commitments, but the list keeps getting smaller.

With luck, I hope it’ll become small enough that I can start focusing a little effort here again. I have so many LP reviews and Star Trek commentaries filed away in my head that I need to convert into actual text! What, you believed me when I said I was consuming media for non-work purposes? Nah, I’m a compulsive essayist. I mentally compose an article about pretty much everything I see or do. It’s a sickness, probably, but it does come in handy, what with my career as a writer and all. I just gotta carve out 15 minutes a day somehow so I can relocate that stuff from brain to keyboard.