If I were a more dedicated man, I'd sit here and chronicle everything that's been going on for the past several weeks. But I'm not. Instead, here's a list of items, in no particular order, that I have recently found to be time-consuming.

• My grandmother's illness
• The suspected illness of someone else who -=AHEM=- shall remain nameless
• Corey's rash
• A trip to the beach
• Work
• Rachel
• Rachel's birthday
• Rachel's birthday depression
• Rachel's birthday depression's rash
• Swine flu
• The ignorance of the mass media
• Playing guitar
• Not playing guitar
• Peeps

Is that enough? It's by no means comprehensive or all-inclusive, or even completely true. But it's a list, and even if it's not the end of the year, I'm a blogger, and I can make it up if I want to.

I've barely slept in the past five days.

First of all, my grandmother hasn't been doing well. It's been almost two (or is it three? I'm not sure) weeks since she started having severe memory problems. Since she's nearly 72 years old, you'd think that it was normal, everyday sort of dementia, but the abrupt nature of it was what led me to believe that something else entirely was going wrong. Add to that the fact that she's complaining of loss of control of her right arm, and that spells stroke.

On Wednesday evening, I decided to drive down there and take her to the doctor. I left early Thursday morning, even earlier than I normally leave for work. I had to run get Rachel some cash first, since she was going to drive down state the next day to meet me at Momma's. I waited until I was about halfway there before I called Nana. She protested, of course, but since she couldn't tell me what day of the week it was, I refused to relent.

A little while later, I called the doctor, got her an appointment for 1300, and a few hours later, I was driving her home following a couple of radiological tests at the hospital. Turns out, she has an 80% blockage in her left carotid, which explains everything. Tomorrow, she's consulting with a vascular surgeon, who's going to open that thing up and scrub it clean.

Friday, Rachel, LM, and I met up at Momma's, then Rachel and I proceeded to the beach. We got to our hotel, checked in but didn't drop things off at the room, and left for the House of Blues. Unfortunately, Google got all confused with the address and it took us over an hour to get there. Fortunately, the show had yet to start.

We ate, despite the attempts from our waitress to keep from doing so, and then saw Zakk Wylde and the Black Label Society. If you ever get a chance to go to one of their shows, don't pass it up. You'll love it.

Then we went back to the hotel and fell asleep quickly. Just not permanently.

Saturday, we bummed around the beach, picking up shells, shopping, eating at Dick's Last Resort, and so on before heading back to Florence. Everything there was cool, and we ate Mexican with Momma, Daddy, and LM. Corey fell asleep in the restaurant, which was a true testament to how much fun he had with his Cootie and Papaw Dave.

We spent the night at Momma's and left pretty early on Sunday. Back home once again, I didn't sleep well due to my back hurting.

Wow. Another complainy blog. I'm sure you've been riveted to your seat. And it's not even well-written. That shows just how tired I am.

I want to revisit that quote for a moment.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

If I were to ever write a memoir or an autobiography, I'd like to find the strip that came from and include it.

See, I get what Snoopy is saying, but I also get what Schulz is trying to convey. Happiness is not a warm puppy, it's doing what you love without laboring over it. Setting a plan in motion is not a necessity. Forming the plan is procrastination in and of itself.

If you want to be a musician, then play music. If you love doing that and devote yourself to it, you'll be successful. Going out for American Idol or cutting demoes just for the sake of trying to "make it" isn't what it's about. If your idea of success is to be the biggest and the best, then you're not a musician. You're a tool.

The same goes for writing. I've wanted to write a great book for so long, but I've labored over how to do it. I need something that's commercially viable, I tell myself, so I can then provide a way to spend all my time writing. That's not true, not at all. The success is in finding the end of the story, not getting it published.

What Schulz wants to point out is that if we do what we love, no matter how we do it, we're going to be happy. God bless that man for saying it, and in such a simple manner that it could come from a cartoon dog's mouth.

On Friday afternoon, on or about 2:35, Rachel and I were married at the Anderson County Courthouse by Judge Martha D. Newton. Momma, Daddy, and Little Man were all there to witness. It was small but wonderful.

Afterwards, we trudged through the rain, ate at Longhorn, went home, cut the cake, and neglected smashing it in each other's face. Momma, Daddy, and Nana took Little Man for the weekend. Rachel and I went out to a movie, which I did not like, then came home and chilled.

On Saturday, we played it lazy. I did go out to Best Buy to pick up an Easter gift for Little Man, but after that, we ordered pizza and watched movies, doing nothing more.

Sunday morning, we left for Momma's. On the way down, Rachel got a speeding ticket, which we're going to have to fight in court on the 23rd of April. It's a four point violation, but hopefully, we can get that reduced, especially since the cop didn't do that for us to begin with.

When we finally made it to Florence, we ate beef stew and rice in celebration of Daddy's birthday, which was on the 24th. Afterwards, Rachel and I went to Wal-Mart for a few things, including a poker set and some bubble stuff for Little Man. he spent the afternoon playing with those, creating a great mess that took little time to clean up. Bubbles are just soap, after all, and therefore inherently clean.

Rachel and I played some rummy. I finally got to where I can win some, which was cool, although she doesn't like the way I play. To her, reading the other player (not by seeing her cards or anything, just adapting to her play style) is cheating. I had no idea anyone would think that. It's just the way I play.

Yesterday morning, we got up and left Florence to go to the Columbia zoo, but not before I saw a bald eagle flying around my mother's neighborhood. That was cool.

The zoo was mucho funastic, though the aquarium gave me a horrible headache. It's the thick glass, low lighting, and the water in the tanks that creates an effect destined to drive my brain to the pain place.

We got home around seven o'clock, gave LM a bath, and settled down to watch a movie.

So far today, everything has been nice and quiet. Everybody at work has been congratulating me, which is nice. And I found a quote earlier that I'm particularly fond of.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Who said that? Snoopy. I think that's a masterfully profound thought.

I find it highly annoying when someone asks for a favor, then acts as if my time's completely invaluable.

This happens to me all the time at work. People come to me with their problems because I'm great at fixing things. I have a lot of experience in the industry and generally know the solution without too much problem-solving involved. That's fine, and I'm glad that I can help.

However, people need to realize that I've got enough of my own work to do without sitting there for extended periods of time, listening to them hem and haw over details, waiting while they take phone calls, and all the other crap that they force me to go through while offering up my assistance.

It's enough to make me want to reject them outright.

This isn't completely different. There can be no completely different. Not anymore. But this is something, and that something is special, at least to me.

First, the little bit of meta to get out of the way. I'm going to try blogging again, without any hard or fast rules, except for one. No more meta. I'll never again apologize for not blogging, never again will discuss blogging, and never, ever again say, "hey, I'm blogging again."

I swear it.

With that out of the way, let me say that today isn't the best, but it's no one's fault. I couldn't find my coffee press this morning -- Rachel washed it, and it was in the drainer -- so I spent several hours with a very great lack of caffeine in my system. Those who know me know that's not a good state to find me.

But I've got coffee now, and I'm doing much better. And there's more coffee to come, too. However, it's cold and rainy outside. That doesn't make me happy. I like warm and rainy just fine, or cold and dry, or warm and dry. Cold and wet, no sir.

Something ought to cheer me up.

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about doing some web development.

There are a number of little tools that I've written that have been insanely useful to me. One of those, my RSS reader, is something that I simply couldn't live without anymore. You see, I tried a number of different things to deal with the flood of news that the Innertrons generate every day, but I couldn't find anything that did it the way that I wanted. So, I had to roll my own, and it took quite a bit of doing.

I don't know if anyone else wants to read news the way I do -- one article at a time, in order that it was published -- but I imagine that there could be. The application isn't all that complex, but right now, it's only written for a single user. In other words, you've got to have a website to run it, and you've got to know enough about code to get it set up.

I guess I could open the source of it, but part of me is against that. I'd rather do software as a service.

This isn't the only thing I've got, but it's a shining example. The problem is that I've got no framework to develop it into a fully-featured website.

A couple of years ago, I fooled around with Ruby on Rails just long enough to develop a strong dislike of the package. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but it's just not the way that I like to do things. After that, I looked at the Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Cake, and a host of other frameworks.

I prefer to code web junk in PHP. Sure, it's not the greatest language out there, but the greatest ones usually aren't the most useful. C isn't the greatest language, either, but damn if it's not the most widespread.

My conundrum is that I can't just cobble crap together. The perfectionist in me won't allow it. And each time I start trying to put something together, I find myself digging through the minutiae over and over again, never coming up with the full product.

At some point, I'm sure that I'll find all the time I need to put together a complete web service package, but I"m just not there yet. In the mean time, maybe I'll keep writing snippets of stuff I find useful. That way, once I do have the backend, I can load it full of all kinds of apps.