I decided to practice self-discipline tonight and work on the Temple bulletin before flipping my page. Much to my surprise, editing other people’s writing has burnt out my writing need for tonight, so this is going to be a very short entry.

Today at work, a colleague asked me why I update my ‘blog faithfully (even if it’s not always daily, unlike some truly dedicated folks). I had to think about it for a bit, but in the end, my answer was rather selfish — I write for me.

Usually, it’s just to get something off my chest (I could talk about today’s travel agent experience, but let’s just leave that one alone), but sometimes, the mere act of writing here helps me clarify issues in my mind.

At other times, I write to remember — that’s the purpose of my “Wine of the Day” entries; we don’t have wine all the time, not by any means, and until I started keeping track here, I’d forget what we’d drunk and how we liked it (and it wasn’t due to the quantity of alcohol!).

Occasionally, I write to recommend (or warn), though I haven’t done that for a while (the ARRL License Manuals aren’t exactly “Book of the Day” material, though they were very helpful to me).

Once in a while, I even have a story to tell or pictures to share.

I’m delighted when other people enjoy what I’ve written (I find the data on my referers page interesting, as is the info I gather from the Site Meter report), and feedback in the discussion area is always welcome.

And parts of my far-flung family read this ‘blog regularly, saving me postage (just kidding, Mom!).

But in the final analysis, I write here because I enjoy doing so, and I am grateful to Dave and Userland for giving me the opportunity to so.

And for tonight, that’s about all the enjoyment I need on this front. Time to get up from the keyboard for the evening!

We’ve also continued on our movie-watching streak, which will come to an abrupt end when Jeffrey starts getting homework again. Last night, we saw High Noon — now I want to watch Outland and Blazing Saddles again. And we also finally got around to seeing Wrongfully Accused (hey, it was the best DVD I could find at the nearby Blockbuster, and I had coupons to use up!). I was pleased to find that not all Blockbusters have as bad a selection of DVDs than the two closest to me, but I wish there were some decent rental places nearby. Laserland has a good selection, but has short rental periods, so it’s hard for us to see a movie without paying overtime fees.

We watched several more Iron Chef episodes on New Year’s Day; it’s much nicer with subtitling and dubbing (I’m glad they subtitle Kaga instead of dubbing him, though) than it was trying to figure it out without such aids.

Oops…plumbing problems to take care of…more later, maybe….

I dunno what happened — Diane came in and said that there was water all over the bathroom floor. It seems to have come from the toilet, but it stopped when she jiggled the handle. So I adjusted the water level (we have 3.5-gallon toilets with weird mechanisms; I don’t want to have to replace them with 1.6-gallon units with even weirder innards until I have to!) and we’ll see what that does.

And just so the plumbing doesn’t feel superior, the oldest computer has started to act funny, too. We tried to shut it down, and it got as far as blanking the display in preparation for showing the “Please wait for Windows to shut down” screen…but never quite got there. A jab at the reset button brought it back up, and this time it shut down cleanly. But it’s been getting more and more blue screens of death lately; perhaps it’s trying to tell me that BillG needs more money?