Hello, Everybody:

It’s been almost two weeks since I said anything here, and I wasn’t saying much before that.

Things have been nuts.

Here are some of them in a nutshell:

Some long-standing family health issues took new and difficult turns, culminating in surgeries and hospitals and some frustrating developments that can luckily be handled and improved with time. In fact, things are already starting to calm down and even out. Whew.

And then …

I’d already been working lots of extra hours at the day job, but two Saturdays ago I initiated one of the biggest accidents in employee history.

I’m in charge of making backups. I do this diligently, and carefully, and often. Long story short, I changed a folder because I was sick of looking at it on my desktop, and in doing so somehow dumped an old backup from April back into the server instead of  taking from the server and putting it into the backup, and since I thought I had a good backup, I replaced the other good backups with the bad backup and therefore nuked our office back to April 9, 2008 with no hope of recovery … because I’d also nuked all hopes of recovery.

Luckily everything existed on paper … so we’ve been having to enter it all in — again — manually. That’s months of very complicated, very tedious, very important data.

So I was at the day job 75.5 hours since Friday, April 19, entering it all in — again — with the help of my co-workers.

Thankfully my boss is a good man who was remarkably calm about it and far more understanding than he needed to be, and I appreciate that infinitely.

People have been like, “Hey, John, it’s okay, computers mess up all the time.”

Nope.

The computer did exactly what I told it to do. Not on purpose, of course, but it is what it is, and what’s done is done, etc.

And then, in the middle of all this, my parents’ property — but thankfully not their house — was devastated by the crazy hurricane winds that made their way up here a few Sundays ago. Trees were shattered and broken all over the place, and the yard was covered in some very large and some very small branches and limbs and chunks, etc.

Yesterday, after I left the day job, I went home to help clean things up (because no one’s had the time or the ability to even touch it with all the family health stuff happening). And in one of the most awesome displays of community I’ve ever seen in my life, my co-workers Stephanie and Amanda and their families showed up with chainsaws and helping hands to help clear everything up. It was a beautiful gesture that I’m thankful beyond words for, and I will never be able to thank them enough.

So add some exhausting physical labor on top of all the other stresses and strains, and it’s been a rough few weeks.

And then, on top of all that, I have to read that they’re making another fucking National Treasure movie.

Anyway.

Between family health stuff and a massive calamity (of my own causing) at the day job, there’s been no time for anything but working and eating and occasional, fitful sleeping.

And there are so many movies and albums and comics I want to tell you about.

I’ll get started on those as soon as I can.

I’ve missed you guys.

More to come.