Well, even though the site doesn’t look much different, I got some good behind-the-scenes updating done yesterday. I would have done a little bit more, but I had to drop everything so we could go see Jake Johannsen at the Hartford Funny Bone in, you guessed it, Manchester.

I don’t get it either.

To make things even more interesting, the club is in a mall. Right next to a Panera Bread and a soon-to-be-opened Bertucci’s. Will the weirdness never cease?

So I’m lying on the couch, sweating and typing, and Barb’s cell rings. barb didn’t get there in time, so had to wait for the voicemail. It’s her best friend Mary, wondering if we’d like to meet her and Craig (her husband, if you’ve just joined us) in Manchester to see Jake at 7:30. Would we? Would we? (Harelip! Harelip!)

Shortly after, either Mary calls the home phone or Barb called her back (the heat makes things fuzzy) (that’s what she said). Come to find out, we’re going to meet them at Pepe’s beforehand for pizza. We need to meet them there at 5:30. Sounds great, yes?

Did I mention it was 4:45? Or that Barb and I both needed to get showered and cleaned up? How about that Google says the mall is 41 minutes away?

We cleaned up in record time, got Phoebe fed and put her in my office (where the air conditioning is), raced out to my car, charged up the flux capacitor and made it there a mere ten minutes late. Which, now that I type it out, doesn’t seem nearly as impressive as it felt. Did I also mention that my “low fuel” light came on halfway there? That might have added to the excitement.

So we made it there in possibly record time (considering all the drafting and coasting I had to do), had some great pizza, and watched some great comedy. The MC was great, the first guy (Tom? Sorry - if I don’t take notes, I’m useless) was awesome and Jake was possibly even more funny than he usually is. Still seems weird to see him without the curly hair, though.

The MC’s last name was “Crohn” so he made a couple of Crohn’s Disease jokes, which made Craig feel good, since he has it. In his words, “Hey, this means at least someone knows what it is now!” Yep, they’re hittin’ the big time. When we left the club, I was tempted to pull the MC aside and confront him.

“So. I heard your little Crohn’s Disease jokes up there. What, cancer isn’t FUNNY ENOUGH any more? Where are OUR jokes? Pander to us!!!!”

But I didn’t, since each of us sickos needs our time in the spotlight, right?

We made it back home without incident (the gas station was downhill from the mall) and I only had to spend $36 on gas!!

Because I only put in half a tank’s worth. Oy.

Well, a few minor ones anyway. I figured I should warn you, since I know there are SO many of you just constantly refreshing the site to look for updates and changes (I’m looking at you, Veronica). I’m finally updating this theme to support WordPress widgets along with a few minor changes here and there I’ve been needing to do for awhile.

Why? Mainly because it’s too hot to move, the fans are on in the bedroom and my laptop is right here. Nothing to do but sweat or update the site. So since I’m a Type A go-getter, I’m doing both at the same time.

Also, I used to have a “Contact Me” page with a form to fill out to send me email for whatever purposes. I’ve taken out the form & the link to it, because the form plugin I was using has a hole that spambots have been taking advantage of for quite awhile. You can still reach me at my usual email address (my first name at this domain) or one of my Moondoggie addresses if you have one of those. Once I have a better contact form, I’ll bring it all back.

Well, back to tinkering I go…

I really thought I was a loser and had already missed a day of posting, but it turns out today was actually yesterday’s tomorrow! Whodathunkit.

Of course, that could be from pulling my umpteenth work all-nighter last night. Finally got (most) of the bugs worked out and the Big Project is out the door. Mostly.

I can see all of you, but it’s like through a weird hazy fog…

Since my brain is wandering more than usual, here’s a short list of things you can expect to see in the near-to-not-so-distant future:

• Brian finally gets his personal life extricated from work.
• Brian finally gets back to work on Cancer is My Bitch.
• Night of the Splitting Blogs! Since I’m soooo over the whole cancer thing, I’ll be going back to the ol’ random non-cancery posts. Between that and pushing ahead with the CiMB movement, I’m going to “Splitteth the Blog in Twain” as the kids say. Anything cancery or CiMB-related will still be there, while the old weirdness is safely nestled back in the bosom of moondoggie.com
• Brian finally gets his photos organized and uses that domain he’s had for them for, like, forever.
• Brian finally gets the CiMB emails back up and running.
• Brian finally stops referring to himself in the third person.
• Flying cars!
• Trendy new web designs!
• Occasional frightening personal discoveries of how old I am, when I do the math after hearing things like Billy Joel releasing a special 30th anniversary edition of The Stranger.
• Purple, purple, purple, as far as the eye can see!

I’m ready for my nap now, Mr. DeMille.

One other thing while I’m at it. My email hasn’t always been the best in the past, what with spam blocking deciding to randomly keep the real emails from me and such, but I haven’t been able to get into any CiMB addresses for the past… two weeks? Three?

We changed our email setup at work from hosting email ourselves to using a hosted Exchange server. While this saves me a lot of headaches with keeping email going for the company, it also had an ugly side effect. I was keeping and storing all of my email in Outlook. Once you set up an Exchange account in Outlook, it apparently doesn’t want to play nice with POP/IMAP accounts. You can get your email from those accounts, but everything I’m reading says Outlook will only send email out through the Exchange account from this point forward. Lovely.

So, since (say it with me) work has been crazy, I haven’t had the time to get all of my non-work email accounts set back up in Thunderbird yet. I know I could create a second profile in Outlook for them, but I like to be able to check all of my accounts through the day, so it’s back to Thunderbird for the personal stuff.

So if you’ve sent me an email to a CiMB address in the past month or so, I’m not ignoring you - I just haven’t read it yet. If you sent me an email before that and haven’t heard from me, there’s a 88% chance it got caught by the spam blockers and I’m not ignoring you. Af dor who the other 12% are, I’ll never tell ;)

I still don’t have the CiMB emails online yet, so if you want to send me an email, you can either send it to a CiMB address and wait or send it to a Moondoggie address if you know one.

I’ll post an update once I have the CiMB email all set up again.

Wow - August was my last post. August? Seriously? Wow.

There have been a lot of reasons for my silence the past few months. The first one being (say it with me gang), work has been crazy. The craziness is finally starting to call down just a little, so I’ll be able to pay a little more attention to you, my adoring public.

The other big reason is, I’ve lost some great friends recently. With each one, I’ve felt that I needed to write one of my novella-length posts in memorial to them both for me and for their families. But with each new loss, that meant I had another novella that I needed to write. I’ve felt more guilty for not paying proper tribute to them than for leaving all of you in the lurch.

With these enormous self-imposed tributes hanging over my head, it didn’t feel right to write about the more trivial things in my life until I paid them each the proper respect. And due to the work craziness, I didn’t have the time available to sit and type away.

Finally, my wife and a bunch of Hodgers made me see the light. Last weekend, we had our big Hodgeapalooza East meetup, where a bunch of us from the Hodge Board got together to eat, drink and be more than merry. It was an awesome weekend keyed off by the fact that two of our more prominent members from Scotland were planning on making the leap over the pond for vacation (no matter what Veronica says). Sensing a once-in-a-lifetime possibility, we had a great turnout of folks with their spouses and/or parents, patients, former patients and caregivers alike.

The most amazing thing is that in this large group of people (30? 40? My math’s been bad lately), there wasn’t a single person who made you think “Oh man, I can’t wait to get aWAY from this fool!” When’s the last time you’ve had that happen in a large gathering? Of course, there’s always the possibility that I was the fool to get away from, but I’m just self-centered enough to convince myself that that is more than likely not the case. Maybe.

Meeting all of these people in person for the first time after going through so much with all of them was… some word that I don’t know. Wherever “amazing” “extraordinary” and the like are on the scale of greatness, pick your own word that’s thirty or forty levels above those. That’s what it was. Being around all of my Hodge family made me realize just how much I’ve missed having them in my life, even when they’re primarily words on a screen. I also realized that not only am I being heard when I speak, but that I’m missed when I’m silent. The realization absolutely floored me. A few people told me how important my jester-like presence was and others told my wife in secret what a difference I was making for them by just yammering away. Okay, they used nicer words, but I have to keep myself grounded, you know.

Seeing that I was making any kind of difference to people out there in the cold cruel world also finally drove home one thought I had been keeping in the back of my brain: The friends I have lost would be SO pissed off to discover that they’re part of the reason I’m no longer out here making people giggle or shake their heads in disbelief at the latest dumb thing I did. I think this is proof positive that there’s no such things as ghosts, because I’m sure they’d all be haunting me by now.

Even though these people were very important to me, I’m going to finally break the barricade by not worrying about long tributes with the perfect thing to say. Sometimes the most perfect tribute is to say that someone has touched your life and will be missed and thought of every day.

Anne-Marie, Sarah, Shannon and Doug - you four are in my heart and mind forevermore. Anne-Marie and Sarah are two of the three people who got me fired up about how folks were treating them and made me decide to make Cancer is My Bitch a Movement. I got a shaky semi-start, but that’s another project crushed by work, another promise broken. I’ll be taking up the CiMB mantle again shortly though, and it’ll be bigger and better than ever. Shannon and Doug I only knew through their spouses, who posted on our Hodge board, but they were just as much family as every other Hodger out there and just as much pain when we lost them. Though I only got to see them through Jesse and Deb’s eyes respectively, it was obvious even secondhand just how strong and loved they both were.

I miss all four of you, though I can’t imagine it’s anything near as much as the people who were actually with you in person feel.

Okay, I’m back to posting now. Now will you guys PLEASE quick making all those spooky noises in the attic?

I’m definitely going to be posting more often now (lofty goal, since my last post was about 10 months ago) and I have Big Plans for CiMB, Moondoggie and my photography, but I’ll slowly reveal those later. I doubt I’ll reach that lofty “post-a-day” goal that I usually set for myself, and I’m tired of breaking promises. So that means, you’re left with “I’ll be posting more frequently,” so suck it up, people.

I just noticed that my last post was on JUNE 22nd and now I’m finally posting again on AUGUST 22nd. Spooky! Not to mention that my jersey number is 22 as well. Oooooo! And Oingo Boingo is playing too! That doesn’t have anything to do with the number 22 as such, but it’s a spooky sounding song.

Well, I did it - today was my first day back at work. That would be Day +122 for those of you keeping track of such things. I myself had to sit down with a pen and paper and do the figuring, so that number might not be right anyway.

Work went well. I’ve forgotten a lot of programming stuff, but I’m well underway in re-learning it all. I went up and down the stairs four times and was quite bushed when I got home tonight.

In other news (since I did no posting in the month of October - for shame!), we’ve rented out the Hartford house! They’re a nice young couple and love the house. So much so, that they’ve mentioned a couple of times that they really want to buy it when the lease is up in April. Cross your fingers that we have a mild winter so they won’t be freaked out by the gas bills. This came just in time for us, since we can now take the house back off the market and someone will be there to shovel the walks and keep the pipes from freezing. Plus, they’re covering most of our mortgage payment, which always helps.

Of course, the very day that the lease was signed and we got the first/last/deposit check, Barb’s check engine light came on. Then my airbag light went on. Barb’s car is gonna cost us $2600 to fix, and I’m pretty sure mine’s a short in the dashboard, as it does other weird things. For the truck, we’re doing research on trading it in and getting something that’ll be safer for me to drive in the winter. That’ll give me something else to write about out here, at least, right?

We had a moderate number of trick-or-treaters last night, with the best being our little next door neighbor. Her brother was dressed as Anakin and she was something furry (both near ten-ish). She asked Barb if Barb could guess her costume and after a little pause, perusal and a couple of spins, Barb asked “Are you a squirrel?” She was overjoyed, since in fact, she was a squirrel. Barb mentioned that squirrels were my favorite and how I take care of my little buddies. Turns out, they’re constantly feeding the little guys as well. No wonder we have such fat squirrels in our neighborhood!

One last sad Halloween note - I came very close last night to reporting some parents for child abuse. We had to return some pants I bought earlier in the day and around 7:30 the trick-or-treaters had slowed down to a trickle, so we went back to the store. When we get to the store, it was us, the employees and a family consisting of two parents and two kids, both within trick-or-treat age. Not only were the kids not dressed up for Halloween and out trick or treating, but they were in a clothing store SHOPPING FOR SHOES! Sure, if you have some wacked out religious beliefs, you can keep your kids from celebrating pagan holidays like Halloween, Easter and Christmas, but to instead take them shoe shopping? That’s just cruel and unusual.

Oh, and a quick website note - I’ve added some more warriors over to the Hodgkin’s Army list. If you’ve sent me your URL at some point, I probably have you added now. I’m going to make a resolution to start going through my backlogs of email and start replying to all of the people I didn’t get to reply to through the stem cell days and such. Better late than never, right? Right?

Oh, one more thing. I finally got caught up reading my email, but haven’t gotten caught up on replying yet. Something weird’s happened to my outgoing mail server and I’m not sure whose bailiwick it falls into - my ISP or my webhost. So I can read emails, but replying is next to impossible at the moment. If you’ve sent me an email in the past couple of weeks, I’m not ignoring you - just trying to overcome technical difficulties. Feel free to keep emailing/commenting - I’ll get back to everyone when everything’s fixed.

Oh, and I just wanted to mention: if you’ve sent me an email in the past couple of days, I’m not ignoring you or being my usual lazy self. Dreamhost has been having some major email issues as of late and right now they’re stockpiling our emails on one of the servers while they try to fix the problem. At some point in the near future I should be getting a flood of email and I can start replying. Until then, feel free to leave me comments on the site.

Oh, and being the occasional organization hound that I am, I’ve added two new categories to the site - “Whitney Street” for tales of the current house and “House” for the new place. Of course, being the lazy sloth I am, I’ve only gone back through mid-April or so to add these new categories to the old posts, but eventually I’ll get everything remarked so you can follow parts of our wondrous home ownership story.

For those of you who might not have been around for the original Shaving of the Head, I recently put the Squirrel Fur Chronicle page back together. If I can get certain “other web browsers” to behave with my code, I’ll have a nice photo section where you can access this and many other fun pictorial cancer moments. Joy! In the meantime, deal with it. I’m going to bed.

If the site looks really screwed up to you right now, that would be because you’re using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (aka MSIE) to surf the web. Unfortunately, MSIE sucks and you often get unexpected results. Like you see here. I’m tired now and we just discovered it, so I’ll figure out what’s happening tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’d like to see what the whole internet’s really supposed to look like, feel free to download a real web browser while you wait.

1:08 AM Update: Okay, so I laid in bed tossing and turning for a bit before giving up and coming in here and fixing the problem. I hope you MSIE people are happy with yourselves. Feh!

One quick request - I’ve had a couple of reports of people trying to leave comments who weren’t able to, but then I’ve had others who can. If you haven’t commented before (or even if you have), could you leave me a little note at the end of this? I’d suggest either keeping it short or saving a copy before you submit, just in case it doesn’t work - don’t want you to waste your time. If you try and it doesn’t work (keep in mind that it won’t show on the live site until it’s approved), I’d appreciate it if you clicked that “Contact Me” link on the right and let me know. I might wind up asking you a few questions about what happened. Thanks!

Well, I’ve taken my first step in the “It’s not Art” revolution. I was originally waiting until I had the whole site redone before I added a link to survivor’s blogs, but today I said the hell with it. It doesn’t have to be pretty (yet), it just has to be there. So, if you look over to the right there, you’ll see a list of people who have either beaten Hodgkin’s or are in the midst of the battle. More information about the list can be found by clicking that first link. If you know of someone with The Hodge who’s keeping track of their progress online, click that “Add Me!” link at the bottom and send me the info. The more members we have in the Hodgkin’s Army, the better.

Of course, if we suddenly had no more recruits because this thing was beaten, that would be even better still.

I realized a little while ago that I never brought back the old Semi-Weekly Word site. I’ve got it up on it’s own little subdomain now, and it’s even more patched together than this site right now. If you’re new here, I had this bright idea back in 2002 of picking random words out of the dictionary every week (or so) and writing something revolving around that word. I did it all of four times. One day I hope to go back to my semi-weekly ways, so I got it back up and going. If you’d like to see the little bit I wrote, head over this way. One day, it’ll be nice and pretty and functional. Say… in a week or so.

Ahhh… looks like everything’s all sorted out. Like I said, there’ll be some more tweak and changes and refinement to the site once I decide what else and where else I’m putting things. Consider this the alpha version of the site design. I would’ve waited until I was completely done, but I couldn’t take those round corners any longer. Now we’re back to sharp and pointy and I can relax for a day or two.

Speaking of relaxing, tomorrow morning is my PET Scan to see how the cisplatin/gemzar combo did. Then later in the afternoon I get my weekly bloodwork to see if I can have my wisdom tooth extracted on Thursday.

Yay me.

So I’ve been working a bit on the site design today, as well as getting Barb’s site up and running where she can get back to posting things too. I gave up on coding everything with the new site’s design and made do with hacking and slashing through the default template’s code until I got what I wanted to see. You’ll notice that the site still looks the same. That’s because something wonky’s happening with my webhost right now and it’s driving me insane. I have the new design ready (well, the bones of it - it still needs a LOT of refinement), but I can’t get it uploaded right now for multiple reasons. Plus, I’m looking to do some domain name switching around so there’s that little headache I’ve given myself too. Whee.

Well, today was another blah sort of day. The Power of Neulasta is wearing off, so I don’t feel as sore and achy (yesterday was back to old-school Neulasta - feeling like I’d been beaten by a sack of potatoes). Today I primarily felt sleepy tired, which I’m guessing is probably due to lack of caffeine. You see, I take my caffeine in Coca-Cola form and something about the chemo working on my tastebuds is not compatible with Coca-Cola. Sometimes if I get my Coke from a 2 liter bottle the taste thing isn’t quite so bad, so I think it might be more of a carbonation issue than a specific Coke issue. Either way, my ass is draggin’.

Aside from the whole tired thing, parts of my brain seem to be waking up again. I’ve been coming up with some good coding/design ideas for the new site, though the tiredness makes me feel so blah that I don’t have the energy or focus to try to implement any of them. At least I’m coming up with ideas of some kind. That’s a welcome change from the stupor. Now if I can just get over the “staring at the blank screen” syndrome, I’ll be fine.

One thing I did today was change how my RSS feeds are picked up. I’ve noticed that a couple of people seem to be reading the site that way, so if you are, you might want to change the RSS URL. If you don’t understand what I just said, don’t worry - it’s a geek thing. If you’re one of my RSS’ers, the new RSS feed link is through feedburner. You can still use the old feed link for now, but once the site starts changing, the old link’s not going to work any longer. Probably. You know, while I’m typing this, I think I might go ahead and put a feed button over there on the right. Look at me being proactive.

Except for that stupid ordered list dot on the “Playing:” info. The main thing though, it looks like all of my email is back to normal. At least I sent test messages to and from all of my various accounts and they all seemed to send and arrive like they should’ve. So, if you know one of my email addresses, you can send me email. If you don’t, leave me a comment - I’ll be getting the email links back on the site in a bit. And as cool as the layout of the Hemmingway theme was, I switched back to Kubrick for the readability. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some design time in this weekend so I can ditch the theme. In the meantime, you gets what you gets. Whaddaya want from me? I got cancer.

Speaking of which, I stopped in today to get my weekly bloodwork and the checkout from the nurse. Turns out my platelets are pretty low. The low is around 100 and mine were more like 70. What does this mean? In the words of the nurse: “Don’t get cut.” I guess that means no bar fights this week. Here’s hoping I don’t wake up with another nosebleed. Check that. Here’s hoping that I don’t get another nosebleed, but that if I do, I wake up first. Eeeewwww…

Well, after agonizing over the new design yesterday and Friday, I’ve decided to say the heck with it and just use a default Wordpress theme for now. I still have a lot of setting up and coding type stuff to do to get things like I want them, so I’m going to do all of that first, then worry about the design later. Form before function, you know. Best advice at them moment would be to not send me any email just yet - it’ll take a couple of days for the DNS servers to start resolving to all the right locations and I wouldn’t want to miss your email between servers. I’ll post here when I’m relatively certain that email’s back to normal.

If the site’s not purple any longer, then congratulations! You’re looking at my new home! And if you’re looking at my home, that means… you can leave comments! Welcome to the Brave New World…

Since it’ll be your first time to leave a comment, it’ll be held for review to make sure you’re a real person. So don’t be surprised when it doesn’t show up immediately. Once you’ve commented (and been approved) a couple of times, it’ll go right to commenting in the future.

Changes are afoot here in Moondoggieville! I’m set up with a new webhost, which I’m hoping to be switched over to by the end of the weekend. I’m going to be switching CMS systems from MovableType to WordPress, so I’ll be making sure I’m working in the new place before making the switch. What will this mean to you?

• A new look to the site, since I can’t just start out my new time with the same old website.
• Possible short site outage as the net’s DNS servers repopulate with my new location.
• Longer than usual lagtimes in email replies for a bit as I code the new site and make the transition from one mail server to another.
• COMMENTS! You’re going to be able to comment! Probably!
• The revealing of my latest URLs, one of which you’ve discovered, if you’re the clicking kind.

So, bear with me and we’ll get through the weekend together.

Now I have to shut down and move my computer to a new desk as well. Everything’s changing! Couldn’t you just wet yourself?

Here comes a weekend’s worth of catchup, so get comfortable, get something to drink , and click the read more.
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Well, it’s been a rough week or so, but things are almost back to normal here in Moondoggieville. Great thanks goes out to my good friend and former boss Rob for tracking down my December and January posts in the Yahoo cache - you ROCK! It still took a little bit of finagling and a lot of waiting on Nexpoint support, but we’re finally all back up and going. I don’t recall if I made any posts in February, so I’m waiting to hear back from my parents to see if they have any printouts for me.
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You might have noticed some weirdness going on here at Moondoggie Productions. My web host had a bad weekend, which means I had a really bad weekend. The server my site was on went down “for unscheduled maintenance” for over two days, then when it did come back online, my site was only current up through December 5th of last year. My web host (Nexpoint, who you should stay far away from in my current opinion) claims that the 12/5 backup was the most recent “usuable” backup of the site that they could find and apologized for the inconvenience. According to their own company’s site, one of their “Protective Features” is a daily backup. So apparently, sixty of these daily backups were unusable. Either that, or their web site lies and the backups are more along the lines of bimonthly or worse. I have asked the support people which of these options is the case and they have yet to get back to me with an answer.

In addition, whatever they did and however they did it managed to corrupt by blog’s database so that it no longer recognizes my username/password combination. Hence, the nonstandard looking post here. This means that not only do I have to re-enter all of my entries in the ensuing time, I’ll probably have to re-enter all of the old ones into a new database.

Did I mention that I’m in chemotherapy this week?

So, if you know of any good, honest web hosts who don’t charge through the nose, feel free to click the contact link and send me an email, because I will certainly be looking to go elsewhere.
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So now that I’m back on the PC and not under the pressure to be a Creative Mac Person, I’m ready to start working on the site again. Who knows - I might even get the comments working. I was just never comfortable editing code on a Mac. I need my UltraEdit32 to be truly happy and productive.

All of my computer stuff is now on the second floor. Barb and I are back to sharing an office. Hopefully now that I don’t have The Re-Switch hangong over my head and I don’t have to walk up to the third floor, this will mean I’ll be posting more often.

Of course, that’s no guarantee. So here’s what I’ll do - if you’re getting tired of checking the site every couple of minutes to see if I posted something, click that “Contact Me” link on the left over there. Let me know you want to be on the update list and I’ll start sending out an email when I post something. No spamming, no selling, no giving your email address to all of my perverted little friends. Just a simple email to let you know there’s something new here. Or you can just keep checking every few minutes like you currently do. Right? RIGHT?

I stumbled blearily into Andy Clarke’s website this morning and saw that he had a post today about his referrer logs and associated interesting search terms used to find his site. That prompted me to go back through my logs and see what jewels were waiting out there for me. Here are some of the best, going back to mid-2004 or so.
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Let’s see, what all has happened in the past… holy crap! Twenty five days? Wow, I suck.

The hockey season finished with my team missing the playoffs. We actually had a mathematical chance of making it going into the last game. If the team above us was beaten and we won, we were in. Sadly, they won and we were beaten, something like 12-4. To make it even worse, we got the first four goals of the game. Oy. Well, the new season starts this Wednesday, so we’ll see how the team looks this year.

Cancer-wise, my PET scan is this Friday, and we’ll find out the results next week, along with where we go from here. My bonus end=of-chemo present finally arrived on Thursday. Barb had a t-short made for me with my “Cancer is my bitch” slogan. Sadly, we can’t wear t-shorts with writing at work, or I would’ve worn it Friday. We had a Queen’s Night Christmas party on Saturday, so I wore it then to rave reviews. I’m almost done with my bumpersticker design, so hopefully I’ll be able to order those shortly.

I’ve been feeling pretty good, being chemo-less and all, but I think my body was expecting a treatment last week. I had many of the lesser symptoms through Friday, even feeling a touch of the chemo tiredness at one point. Stupid conditioned body. Hopefully this week my body will finally realize the chemo is over.

Oh, and I’m putting together a little list of Hodgkin’s tips to help out the people coming into this after me. I’ll have a link on the left side of the page to it, just in case you need to reference it further down the road. At the moment, it’s kind of ugly and unreadable, but I’ll eventually get around to making it pretty. Right around the time that I redesign the site, post the house photos, post the wedding photos, the past few years of birthdays… Oh man, I’m feeling dizzy.

Here’s one more way Brian Leetch and I are alike (not the record part - the last bit) :

“Boston’s Brian Leetch scored in the first period and assisted on Nick Boynton’s goal in the second to become the seventh defenseman — and 69th player — in NHL history to reach 1,000 career points.

‘I hope they don’t mention I was on the ice for all four goals in the loss,’ said Leetch, taking care of that himself. ‘Hopefully they won’t remember that, because that was disappointing.’ ”
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Incidentally, the creativity has been bubbling around in me as of late. I’ve been working on some of our web stuff at work and have been getting into more of a web troubleshooting mindset because of it. So, expect weird things on the site over the next few days. I might start tinkering, unless I’m getting married again or going off on another honeymoon.

The more I looked at “The Cansuh Chronicles” link, the less I liked it. I mean sure I’ve “got the cansuh,” but specifically, I’ve got the Hodge. And now, the Hodge Podge is borne.

Still haven’t dug into the comments thing yet, though…

I just did some quick cutting and pasting to archive the old site and start up the new cancer blog, so things are going to be weird for a little while until I get around to fixing them. For instance, that “Add comment” link? Doesn’t do anything ’cause I’m not allowing comments for now. Go figure. A lot of the other links might not work either. I’ll get around to those one of these days, but for now I don’t care. That’s not me talkin’. That’s the cancer…

According to my webhost, UUNet’s been having some problems out there and it’s caused everything related to my host and its sites to occasionally be completely and totally unreachable. Of course, UUNet’s Network Operations Center page showed no problems and I could get to other sites across the UUNet backbone (Through ALTER.NET, to be specific). Sounds like they’re making up things like I used to back in my web tech support days. Oh well. Maybe I’ll be up long enough to post this.

Thanks to a strange burst of insomnia, I finally got around to writing up the Infrequently Asked Questions page. Go take a gander - it’ll do your heart good.

I figured that since it’s been over a month since the last post, it was time to account for my actions. Let’s see… what’s been happening in the past month or so?
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Well, with any luck the weirdness with the site is over. All of my PHP stuff is going and I even added that “Change Styles” section thanks to this article over on A List Apart. Right now all I have is the default look and the results of a challenge from a friend to make my site look “more like Wired’s site.” Unfortunately, the designers over at Wired seem to have access to some sort of top-secret super colors, so this is as close as I could get. Grab some shades before you click.

Okay, so now it appears I’ve made the home page work with many little PHP thingies. Now we get to see if I can do the same to the rest of the site. SaWEET!

Oh, again you’ll probably be seeing some wackiness as I make the transition. Patience, my friend. The future is near!!

Now we get to see the other meaning of Semi-Weekly Word, the fact that I might not necessarily do one a week. But I promise I’ll do better, now that Moondoggie is nearing completion. For now, you can revel in this week’s word, belief.

In the meantime, you might see weird goings-on around the site. I’m going to try my hand at PHP today (maybe) and do a little restructuring. Heck, I might even try making the site look prettier with Chimera, seeing as how that’s what I’m using to browse with at home. It’s all about me, baby.

Like everything in my life, this site is constantly being re-worked. Take a look at the recent site news before you start wondering about the various little oddities you find. This is my first little announcement to the “recently updated” sites, as I figured better late than never. Well, not never. Maybe “better late than at some later point in time which could still be varied to an even later or possibly earlier date.”
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Well, even though I haven’t done a lot of posting (today excluded), I’m getting a lot of work done behind the scenes. All of the various links work now (as far as I know), except the “About” link. I’m still trying to think of witty things to say.

I’m in the process of going back and editing the old Blogger posts, adding categories to them and deleting out the irrelevant stuff. I still need to re-work the error pages, so Astro’s still lurking out there if you try going in the wrong place. There are still many many improvements to come and I’m slowly getting into the swing of writing again, so keep checking back!

Got a few more things fixed last night. Now if my webhost will just stay up and running for 24 hours straight, I can do more things to the site. Just got back from the dentist, so I’m a little woozy from the massive amount of blood loss. More to come after I drink some juice.

Well, here it is, a month short of one year from the last time I’ve stood out here and talked to everyone. I don’t quite remember when I took the site down for a redesign, since it was so long ago, but I’m finally nearing completion. Today is a momentous day for me, another start to a new life. These things tend to happen often to me, but I’m hoping this new life is a good one and that it sticks. Yes, I know that’s pretty cryptic, but I’m trying to hurry up and write something so I can go home. Consider that comment the cliffhanger before the commercial.
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