It’s over. By my count, I wrote 22 posts during the 30 days of November, which I’ll call respectable, considering. I missed a shot at perfection right off the bat when I spent the first evening of November in the emergency room, and the drawn-out sickity-sick through the rest of the month made even near-perfection tough to attain.

But what’s done is done, and I’m not bothered by my missing the mark this year. NaBloPoMo got me out of the blogging slump I’d been in, and that was what I’d most hoped for.

There was once an afternoon when I mused idly that I might like to try making a video every day in December, but John quickly talked me out of that one, thank goodness. Success at such a project would likely be much, much worse than failure.

So long, NaBlo! See you next year! Thanks for the hostess gifts; they’re lovely.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again. Unable to resist fussy’s promises of thirty days of writer’s block, I signed myself up for NaBloPoMo again. A year is just long enough, I think, for me to forget the vow I made never to do this again.

So if it’s consistent daily posting you want—the one or maybe two of you who still stop by occasionally—consistent daily posting you will get. By “consistent” I mean that each post will exist in a similar way as the previous one did; there is no implication of quality.

I signed up two weeks ago, but my blogging inertia is so great that I couldn’t bring myself to write this whole big post about it until today. I started this very post four or five days ago, actually, and only got a sentence and a half in before I . . . got distracted or wandered off to play with the dog or something.

Did I tell you I took the GRE Math? I took the GRE Math. Last Saturday. It went okay, nothing fantastic. I did about as well as I could have, given my level of preparation. Physics is coming up in November, and then I’ll take the LSAT again in December for kicks. Tra la.

I am teaching four nights, three in a row. It would’ve been five, thanks to Humberto, but I will be blissfully unavailable on account of a long-scheduled tutoring lesson.

My car is sick. Have I mentioned this? Possibly. It started making a funny noise, and then the check engine light came on. It went into the shop today, and the mechanic said not only did he not hear a noise, but when he drove it around a bit, the check engine light turned off. THERE WAS A NOISE. I am not a hypochondriac about my car. Okay, maybe a little bit, but seriously, it was whirring and clicking. Abnormally.

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I seem to have strained my eyes, or at least that’s what it feels like. For the last little while, any time I’m on the computer for more than an hour I get headaches and feel nauseated. I feel that way now, in fact, so there won’t be much more of this typing thing. It’s as good an excuse as any to go to bed—I’m a little behind on sleep.*

My point, I think, is that this is frustrating. It means I’ll have to start making blog-reading the LAST thing I do when I sit down at the computer, not the first, otherwise I’ll spend my hour or more without accomplishing anything. Sigh. My life is so hard.

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I expected to get my LSAT score back on Monday, but it came in today. On this test, you could miss one question and still get a 180. I missed both of the questions I thought I might miss, plus two more through mistakes I made—not careless mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. My score was a 175.

On (what was, IMO) the hardest Logical Reasoning question on the test, I stared at it for a good minute, put down a plausible guess and circled it, then came back at the end of the section to stare at it for three or four minutes more. Just as time ran out, I got a flash of insight into the problem and furiously erased and rebubbled my answer.

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Blogging, like many things, is subject to inertia. When I’m chugging along at my usual pace of four or five posts a week, I can summon up the motivation most days to write a little somethin’-somethin’—an overheard conversation, tales of appalling grammar, or a gushy-mom update on the continuing preciousness of my sweet widdle shnuffle-pumpkin*.

Once a week slips by without a post, though, it’s so easy to fall into the one-more-day-won’t-hurt mentality. I’ve half-composed several posts in my head during the last month, but I don’t even remember what most of them were about.

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There’s a conference in Austin this week—South by Southwest. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s huge.

The conference/festival is really three conventions in one: Film, Music, and Interactive. I first heard about SXSW Interactive last year, when a few high-profile bloggers came home and blogged about how much fun they’d had there. (I could’ve sworn I posted something about this last year, but apparently I didn’t.) I thought it sounded super-spiffy and vaguely resolved to go in 2007 because Austin is only three hours away and how could I miss out on that?

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So my posting volume here has been way down of late for various reasons, none of them interesting. I’m busy with school and work, and the free bits of time I can scrounge up here and there are funneled straight into YouTube.

I’ve been having a shitty couple weeks as far as food goes, but I think today was the last day. Yes.

Sam is back to his usual healthy, perky self. We even made it out to the dog park last week when the rain finally stopped. He LOVED IT.

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Once again it’s time to be deeply introspective, an about-face from this blog’s usual navel-gazing flavor.

I’m a bit intimidated by 2005, both the year itself and last year’s YiR. At the beginning of 2005, I declared it a “Year of Transition and Transformation,” and indeed it was.

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Yesterday I cleared out the comment moderation queue here, as I do about once a day. Just now I logged in and found 620 comments waiting for me. Every last one was spam, and more than 90% were nearly identical.

I’ve tried to patch it up—we’ll see if this works. NB: If you’re ever tempted to share an anecdote about your trip to Vegas and all the fun casino games you played there, don’t be surprised if your comment, uh, falls down the stairs or walks into a door or something.