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.