I’ve been using Gmail to back up my book. I upload my notes, outline and current draft after every session of work. Then I put a Gmail label on every one of the emails, so they stand out. I do send the files to an alternate email as well, so I’m sure I have them sufficiently backed up.

This weekend I cleaned out my inbox (long, long overdue), until there was little left except for the record of my endeavor so far. I’m more than halfway through the book, and there are 26 emails. That’s 26 sessions of writing, ranging from one hour to six hours each time. The unintended side effect of using email to back up my work is that I now have an exact chronology of my effort.

Today is my first ride on the bus in over two weeks. The sun is coming up on my left; it looks like a gold coin floating over the Sierras. Spring is here, and the grasses and weeds that populate the sides of Highway 113 are so green they’re practically white, like the pictures one might see in High Times magazine, were one inclined to look.

I did a tiny bit of writing yesterday, the first I’ve done in over two weeks (there must be a bus/writing correlation here somewhere). I was sitting with my laptop in a Starbucks in Northstar, a ski resort/village in Tahoe. My legs were a pile of molasses from the previous day of skiing with my friends Jeremy and Ivan.

Jeremy sat across from me, pretending to read, his legs also ruined. Ivan insisted on skiing another day, and referred to us as “two pussies” before slinging his skis over his shoulder and following his beard up the gondola to its mountain lair.

I haven’t skied in more than 15 years, so every tendon and muscle in my legs the entire time. Jeremy and Ivan let me warm up on a “blue” or medium skill run before ascending to the top of the mountain to the more advanced slopes. I struggled to keep up, but I didn’t fall once (except for that time while standing in line at a lift).

I love to ski and I love the snow. I love being so cold that I shiver in misery, knowing that all I have to do is ski down to the lodge to enjoy the warm shelter. It’s a rare activity for me, to be so out of my element, facing some degree of peril (you would understand if you saw me ski), being made uncomfortable by my environment, and grinning like a damned fool the whole time.

I just moved my sites to a new ISP, one that supports my programmatic bread and butter: ColdFusion. Now I can begin easily remaking this site and other things that I may want to do.

In the process of moving, I acquired a couple of new domain names, fleshpets.net, for the book I’m writing, and haydenkrause.com (for my son to have when he’s a little older). Right now, both of these are just temporary pages I put together in an hour.

I also added a sitemap to this site which lists every post on one page, as well as a buffer page that displays just the raw post and a link to the original. I’m going to keep adding to these pages–putting comment forms in, design elements and navigation–until at some point, I can drop WordPress altogether.

Being on a new ISP that supports ColdFusion means I could start doing more side work, too. So, if you’re in need of a dynamic web application, send word to floatingfoam at gmail dot com.

Getting over any illness is like shedding a skin. I always do the same things: quite drinking coffee, quit drinking Scotch, quit eating like a maniac, quit spray-painting gang graffiti on near-by walls, etc.–the usual collection of bad habits.

When I come around, I wonder, “which shall I pick up first? It’s only 8:00 AM, too early for smoking catnip. Maybe just chew on some raw opium for a while, instead.” Reacquainting myself with bad habits feels kind of silly, though, after suffering through both the symptoms and the withdraw from my habits. But I must do it, if only for the sake of the economy.

One thing that I did immediately after returning to consciousness was launch into an emergency application that needed development at work. Essentially, what was requested was an internal, customizable, Twitter to be used during a convention.

“It’s goddamn Twitter,” I said.

“Yes, we know. They specifically said Twitter in the request.”

“But Twitter?” I asked, hanging my mouth open for emphasis.

Twitter has long been a joke around my work, just as Facebook and MySpace and Digg have all been before. We are a university support unit, not an internet rock star dangerforce, but very often the latest craze catches hold of people in the right places, and suddenly everyone is clamoring for the ‘it’ app.

“We need this Riss thing!”

“You mean RSS? But your pages are static HTML.”

“We need to blogger!”

“Really? Because you only update your site every 563 days.”

Hearing that a request for a Twitter app caused me to laugh and list off the reasons it was a bad idea. However, I was convinced to do it mostly on account of “it would be fun to.” And it was.

It took four days to build a Twitter. I didn’t implement a couple of the features they have, and they don’t have a couple that I do, and it doesn’t really matter anyways because never the twain shall meet.

What’s important is that I just spent time building an experiment based on an idea based on something other people are doing to basically say silly things to each other. I can think of worse ways to spend four days.

Right now, my uvula is sliding around on my tongue. It’s red and swollen and pissed as all hell at any little item I try to swallow.

When I lean my head face down, I can feel the little angry nub scoot forward. I tried to get a picture of it at this repose to share with you, but I couldn’t manage. Every time I got the lighting and angle just right, I would start gagging.

So, instead, feel free to look at this guy’s festering uvula. I guarantee, mine looks worse.