Contrary to popular belief, I still live. Life is always busy, but it seems like it’s been one crisis after another lately.

This is only the second week this year I have not worked overtime. I’ve made extra money, but free time is short. In addition, I’ve been trying lately to give more at work, and let my home life and other interests interfere less.

I’m helping to lead a new men’s group at church around sexual purity/integrity/accountability, which is something I’m passionate about. The church is the one place where men need to be able to speak freely about healthy sexuality, and it doesn’t happen enough. Although I don’t do much in the way of prep for the group, it still eats a free night per week.

We’ve just finished painting the outside of the house and I finished cutting down a tree that has been causing us problems. I thought the fall would be a time to rest and repair, but we had a sump pump failure which partially flooded the basement. This has been pretty hard on my wife and the cats, which makes life hard for me. We’ve had the carpet ripped out (carpet in a basement is stupid), dried everything out, and I’ve replaced the sump pump. There’s still more ripping out to do, and lots of rebuilding, so the fun is just beginning.

In addition, I’m still working on building up my server (mail, CVS and apache work so far), have switched my number 2 desktop to Gentoo, and need to upgrade the main system to Fedora Core 6. Jokosher just froze for the November 20 release of version 0.2, which means I’ve got lots of work to do on the documentation front.

I’ve got a couple crochet projects working, and have decided I’ll probably make things for at least some of the people on my Christmas list. I’m finding that sitting and crocheting at night does wonders to reduce stress, so I hope to continue with that.

Everything takes time, and I only get 24 hours a day to spend.