What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Death, taxes, and when you lose your health insurance you get ridiculously sick.

For serious, folks. I will go for years at a time without picking up any kind of illness, yet almost as soon as I lost my job in March, I developed a cold that hasn’t gone away for almost two months. Now, I can deal with a cold. I mean, it’s a cold. I’m not bleeding out my eye sockets or anything; it’s just a bit of coughing. And that’s hardly going to kill anyone.

Except for the fact that this week has turned into some kind of bizarre experiment on the part of Nature to see exactly how much can be done to me before I give up. My cough got worse a few days ago, and then yesterday the lymph nodes in my throat swelled up so much that it interfered with the workings of my tongue and I sounded like I had cotton balls in my mouth. And then, this morning I woke up to find that my sinuses were all clogged up and my left ear felt like it had a fife and drum corps marching around in it.

So I suppose it’s only natural that almost immediately after my chance to sign up with COBRA expires, I get this kind of terrible, horrible, no good very bad sickness to contend with. Murphy’s Law hasn’t let me down in the past, so why should I expect it to do so now?

So, um, hi. :)

They say that the surest way to know that a blog is dying is that it starts apologizing for the length of time that goes between posts. So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to move right on and try to actually post, y’know, content.

Over the last year(!) since my last post, I’ve had a lot of things happen. The biggest of these is probably that a couple months ago, I lost my job, which has been a somewhat cathartic experience for me, and maybe a little bit eye-opening as well. It’s worth noting that I’ve done a TON of photography over the last year, some of it for fun and some for business. Yeah, that’s right, I said business. As in, I think I’m going to try and make a photography business take off the ground.

I’ve had a REALLY big jump in the quality of my photos over the last year and I’m going to take some time over the next few weeks to upload a bit of it (including some in this post), but it’s worth noting that I’ve purchased a new domain name and it’s going to be the primary focus for a photography portfolio. I want to separate out my personal/family photos from my professional stuff, so I’m thinking that what I’m going to do is either create a second Flickr username for my professional photos, or keep it only on my professional site (which will more than likely contain a photoblog, while this site will be more writing-, family- and life-oriented) and pull the professional stuff out of my existing Flickr pool.

But none of that’s happening just yet. Keep an eye out for the announcement of my photo studio website, but in the meantime, here’s a good cross-section of some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year. I’ll include links to the album pages if you want to look at the other photos from the sets.

from Memorial Day Barbecue
from Seth and Christine’s Big Day
from July 4th at Rob & Ryan’s
from Sailfest 2009
from Takeout/ATICC Fashion Shoot
from Brokedown Serenade, 8/29/09
from I AM Festival 2009