Treating ADHD Blog

Archives: January 2009

The Ultimate SuperBowl Special

If this SuperBowl snack doesn't tempt ADHD sufferers, then you have more self control than I.

Much has been said about the positive effects of a nutritious diet on ADHD sufferers. So, in the spirit of the upcoming SuperBowl, I wanted to provide links to the following plats du jour. Eye-catching, nostril-tickling, mouth-watering examples of haute cuisine at its highest.

The Bacon Explosion Roll

And

Snack Food Stadium Bon Appétit!!

The Difference Between Depressed and Sad

Depressed isn't the same as sad. It's worse than sad. Depression lies closer to numbness.

How do people who do not, by the most wonderful roll of the genetic dice, suffer from depression? And, further, how much do they understand about those of us who do?

There's been so much talk about depression on television and the internet that I'd have to guess that the average non-depressive person has a better idea of what the story is than was the case decades ago. Big Pharma has spent enormous sums of money "explaining" to people who suffer from clinical depression that it's not their "fault." Typically, the ads contain a quickly-shifting series of micro-vignettes, showing the various forms depression can take. You know them: they show men and depressed women wallowing in misery. Staring off into space. Toying with their food. Ignoring the obligatory, confused and sympathetic golden Labrador. Veiled hints about a lack of connubial bliss. Pitying, confused, resentful glances from co-workers. (Please forgive the absence of my usual parallelism in the preceding phrases. I'm not thinking as clearly as I do most of the time. Wait! Maybe I'm depressed!!! Holy guacamole, Batman.)

Awright, awright. Here's the gist of what I'm muttering about. "Depressed" isn't the same as "sad." It's worse than sad. Sadness is a relatively active state, in that you're feeling something. Depression, in my vast experience, both first- and second-hand, lies closer to numbness. When I'm really getting beaten up by my chemicals, I'm not sad. I'm a complete zombie. I'm not afraid, either. My head keeps hearing, or saying (I'm definitely not together enough to start an investigation of the issue of duality) "Don't be sad, don't be frightened. Maybe the frost will work a big piece of a Palladian pediment loose and it will fall on your head as I'm strolling up Madison Avenue, and then you won't have to worry about being sad or frightened, right?" It's truly pathetic how comforting this possibility can be.

That's it for now. Depression has its icy hands wrapped tightly around my larynx. But I'm not sad. You want to see sad, watch someone who finds out that his golden retriever is terminally ill. That's sad. I'm just sitting here like a rutabaga, trying to find the strength to go to tai chi.

The ADHD Fastball

Great pitchers remember their failures and never repeat their mistakes. I can't even focus long enough to remember there is a fastball coming at me.

For reasons unknown to your faithful ADHD scribe, sports journalists decided long ago that players at certain positions would have almost invariable tags, attached in Homeric fashion, to their names. So there's the "slick-fielding shortstop," the "rifle-armed rightfielder," the "far-ranging centerfielder" and my personal favorite, the "crafty southpaw." Sometimes the broadcasters slip and say "crafty leftie" but that sounds like a political statement or a breakfast cereal.

Why, you ask, are lefthanded pitchers thought to be sly? I doubt that it has to do with the left/sinister connection. More likely, since the crafties make up a relatively small percentage of the pitchers in baseball, batters, whichever side they hit from, find it a less-comfortable situation than hitting against a rightie. Pitches break differently, and from different angles, but it's not really connivance so much as circumstance. For a craftie to throw a breaking ball that takes the same path as a rightie's curve, he'd have to throw one hellacious screwball.

The truth is that crafty pitchers aren't all lefties, nor are all lefties crafty. But all topnotch pitchers are crafty to some degree, an attribute that becomes increasingly important as the hurler's ability to throw an overpowering fastball diminishes. The craftiest pitcher of modern times, Greg Maddux, was renowned for his memory, foresight and gamesmanship.

Wondering what this has to do with our ADHD affliction? Here you go: the great pitchers, especially the guys like Maddux and Whitey Ford (did you seriously think I could write even one paragraph about baseball without bringing in a Yankee?) never repeated their mistakes. If a batter hit a dinger off a Maddux curve, high and inside, with a man on third and one out and a three-and-one count, he could play until he was old enough to start taking his pension and he'd never see that pitch again. Do you think Maddux guessed? No, I'm sure he had a little notebook that he reviewed before each start. But the fact remains that he was able to access that information while he was on the mound, and put it to very effective use.

Me, I'd be lucky to remember the signs the catcher was flashing at me with his taped fingers. Not that my bad memory was the biggest impediment to my pitching major league ball. There was the matter of my 68 mph fastball, too.

Booze, ADHD, and Blogging

My hands keep working pretty well when I'm drinking. My ADHD mind is more problematic.

I've tried to avoid this, largely because I think that according to whatever code of scribal ethics I do, or should, observe, it's reprehensible.

Nonetheless — and this might well have summat to do with my having read about one of my literary heroes, W.H. Auden, sitting in a dive bar on St. Mark's Place sucking down the VSOP all day long, no doubt fending off propositions from Ginsberg, writing away. I can't do it. I believe I've made that clear.

If I haven't, here's the dilly-o. My hands keep working pretty well when I'm drinking. My ADHD mind is more problematic. Of course, my mind is problematic in the best of situations. I sure as hell can't control it.

So it's snowing here in Gotham. It would be an excellent night to find a nice ginmill and spend the rest of the evening consuming a pride of beers and a couple of packs of Marlboros. Except for (1) I don't smoke any more and (2) even if I did, you can't light up in bars here in the city.

There were a couple of pints in the refrigerator when I got home from tai chi, and they went fast, so I had a couple more. All to the good. I can feel the universe narrowing, feel my interest in my own thoughts burgeoning, and feel the external noise fading away. The thirst is far from satisfied, amigos. But that's it for tonight. I know where I stand, and where I'd stand, or flop, if I had a couple more pints. Nowhere good, I assure you.

The issue of creating, even on the abcedarian level at which I compose, and drinking is complex. It's like juggling sushi knives. One slip and you're not witty, you're exsanguinating. Remember the scene in Deer Hunter where Walken was playing Russian roulette? Not quite so severe, but a loss is a loss.

So I'll be signing off now, chillin' like Bob Dylan. When I review this tomorrow, I may have more to say.

L'chaim.

Money Makes the ADHD World Go Round

Money goes not to the brilliant or the aggressive but to those who welcome it.

Emotional/psychological/cognitive problems being what they are, which is to say resistant to precise definition and highly mutable, the temptation exists, once one has been diagnosed with one or more, to attribute all of one's difficulties to those accused malfunctions. Like so many temptations, this one often leads to unconstructive, if not actually ruinous, behavior.

In my case, one of the sorriest aspects of my connection to the outside world is my inability to handle money. This can easily be divided into five clear areas in which I had problems:

(a) Making Money
(b) Understanding Money
(c) Keeping Track of Money
(d) Holding on to Money
(e) Not Being Embarrassed about Money

While these might not appear to be subjects whose difficulty rivals that of understanding string theory, my inability to master them has been one of the primary founts of misery in my life. I have no clue about (a), as the record shows. This is partly the result of (b). The resultant anxiety and inability to keep moving forward toward solvency, if not prosperity, leads to (c) and (d), which leaves us looking wistfully at (e).

Shame about money is a curious thing. I recall a time when my father made an unusually large profit on a job, and somehow wound up owning a piece of a commercial laundry as a result. I was walking along with another kid (not a good friend, but someone, whose name I still know, who I thought was kind of cool. Probably the DA/flattop haircut). We must have been around ten, and for some reason I mentioned that my father now owned a second business. The most vivid part of this reverie is that I was at great pains to explain to him that even so, we weren't "rich." Of course, we weren't even close to rich, or prosperous. We were middle-class folks who owned a house in a middle-class suburb, and a car and once in a while a little motor boat.

I can't conjure up what it was that made me so anxious not to be considered "rich." Most likely, I saw "rich" as being closely affiliated with different. Being a skinny, bespectacled kid and one of the few Jews in my part of town, I was already different, and none too happy about it. This feeling never went away. It's what propelled me into the arms of alcohol and nicotine. Cool guys drank and smoked, preferably to excess.

It's not easy to make money, money in large quantities, if you feel that by doing so you're excluding yourself from the guys who even though they only had a couple of bucks, still looked down on me. Or so I thought. And then, later, in college, I tried to adopt the role of the hoods in my town vis-a-vis the preppies and the overachievers. That didn't work so well either. Many of the preppies were far more degenerate than I could hope to be and the "real students" were busy trying to get into Harvard Law, so that they had neither the time nor the inclination to be impressed or intimidated.

When I started to write this, I knew I'd lose my bearings and drift away from the issue of money. But there you go. Money goes not to the brilliant or the aggressive but to those who welcome it, secure in their belief that they have a friend in Mammon.

To me, Mammon was a big kid with a grandfather from Naples, who was about to steal my Schwinn.

Punctuating My ADHD Brain

My ADHD kicks in almost exclusively when I'm dealing with abstract situations.

I believe that in an earlier Treating Adult ADD Blog posting I mentioned my perhaps-Romantic attraction to craftsmanship, and my regrets that I'd not pursued, say, tool-and-die making or furniture building in my youth. (Saying, "I believe…I mentioned" means, as those of you who stop by this stand regularly know, that I may have done so, may not have done so, may think I've done so but haven't or may think I haven't but have. Or that the whole megillah is a fabrication. Fabrication. That's a woodworking joke. Right? OK. I'm moving, officer, I'm moving.)

Whatever the antecedents, it's worth mentioning again (or not again…WHAT! NOT AGAIN!!!) why I'm attracted to benchwork. The simple version is that in my case, the ADHD kicks in almost exclusively when I'm dealing with abstract situations. (And, as I wrote in my blog the other day, when I'm dealing cards.) (Sorry about all the parens, but there was this going-out-of-business sale at the local Font Hacienda last week and…[obviously, the ellipses {…«which, FYI, are properly set as a single character (and these double arrow thingies are called guillemets and the French use them as "quotation marks")»}] but we can start our discussion of typography some other time, OK?).

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry. It's tiring, balancing all those parens (that's a proofreader's joke, son).

Well, obviously typing doesn't count as craftsmanship because you can see how far down the slippery slope I've already skidded here. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go for a walk now and see if I can get all of these random glyphs out of my head. I'll be back shortly, and we can talk about "curly quotes" which the stupid lines around "curly quotes" aren't. And then we can get back to marquetry. And tool-and-die making. And locksmithing.

Honey, do you remember if I took my Concerta this morning?

The Perils of Technology + ADHD

If your ADHD doesn't leave you depressed, wasting a half-day redoing the computer work you've already done will.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. As a matter of fact, it's always better to be lucky than good, since, or so we're told, no good deed goes unpunished. This is by way of demonstrating another area in which I'm dysfunctional: sending email.

When I started writing blog postings for ADDitude, I typed the postings in Word and sent them as attachments. This was easy enough, but it chained me to one computer, since, unless I'd sent the posting, there was no way for me to access it for further work on another machine. Then I started using Google Docs. Probably I've related at least some of this mishegoss already, but bear with me. Best method I could come up with using Google Docs was to write in a doc, download it as a Word doc, and then send that as an attachment.

Those of you who have the computer literacy of the average fifth-grader are already squirming in your seats, waving your hands and going "OOOO OOOO OOOO" like that character in Welcome Back Kotter. You little devils have figured out that this method left me without a built-in labeling system, so I never knew what I'd sent without going back, downloading it, and, horror of horrors, reading my own material again. Brrrrrrr.

Last month I found out that I could insert a header so that each document would have its name, number and date at the top. Then I'd rename the doc with the info from the header. Then, when I was finished, I'd just go to "Share" and click on "Email as an Attachment" and enter my editor's saintly name and off I'd go.

Yesterday I found that three of my postings hadn't seen the light of day.

Why? Well. First, two of them had the same names. Different texts, but same names. Lazyboy copied and pasted so he wouldn't have to poke around for the underscore (_). Of course, this implied that Lazyboy would change the information on the new posting. But nooooooooooooo. And then it became apparent that although I'd changed the info in the header, somehow I'd forgotten to change the info in the name of the doc, so that although the docs and the headers corresponded, I had three postings with the same title in the email.

Don't worry if you can't follow this. It took me an hour to sort it out. An hour. And you know how many postings we're talking about, all told? Sixty? Twenty? Nope. EIGHT. Huit, ocho, acht! Seriously.

So many stupid errors. And you wonder if there's a link between ADHD and depression? I'm so depressed about wasting this whole afternoon that I feel like banging my head against the wall.

My ADHD Wanderlust-Infected Synapses

An ADHD diagnosis is like driving a nail through a blob of mercury. With all the other comorbid conditions mucking up my brain, diagnosis is a shot in the dark.

So. Depression/ADHD. ADHD/anger management. ADHD/substance abuse. Substance abuse/loss of concentration. Depression/loss of concentration. Chicken/egg. Carrot/stick. Cart/horse. Nature/nurture.

Remember "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story? Brilliant lyrics (you were expecting maybe gibberish from Sondheim) including this line:
Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.

It's a problem. You go to your doctor with your pinkie finger sticking out perpendicular to the side of your hand, it's pretty obvious — you broke a bone. Your doctor tells you that your liver weighs as much as a bowling ball, and is about the same consistency — right, the quart of Jim Beam for lunch has to go.

You go to your doctor and tell him that you can't keep your mind on your work? Note how the glassy stare appears on your medico's face as he reaches for his prescription pad. You know what's going on inside his mind, don't you?

Xanax? Ritalin? Prozac? Concerta?" Did my nurse really mean that? local:/adhd/article/718.html:"Wellbutrin? Who's on 'Dancing with the Stars' tonight? Strattera? Honestly, I'm not impugning doctors. Sometimes they can't concentrate either. But this kind of diagnosis is like driving a nail through a blob of mercury, to resurrect a venerable cliché. If you're discussing this problem with your internist, my careful calculations predict that he has approximately 1 chance in 7 of coming up with the right answer. And he'll probably hedge by suggesting an alternative, just so he has a chance for the place money (caught me - been reading Damon Runyon again).

No, of course I don't know where I'm going with this, you knucklehead. I'm the one with the wanderlust-infected synapses. I had a thought when I began, I think. Now it's just autopilot. And someone seems to have put a magnet next to my compass.

A Fork in the ADHD Road

I'm trying to find a balance between sharing my ADHD experience in a blog and putting too much personal information out there in the digital world.

Yogi Berra, the Sage of the Grand Concourse, the omphaloskeptic Neapolitan, once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, you should take it."

I haven't a clue how one would accomplish that, but I am at a fork in the road.

The blame for my erratic blog submissions to ADDitude can be laid on several doorsteps: my innate laziness, my inability to manage my time with any dexterity or consistency, even, mirable dictu, my very affliction with The Deficit. But issues of privacy and modesty, or shame, loom larger and larger.

While I'm interested in the whole panorama of the ADHD experience, I find that doing research on the latest ADHD meds or a controversial diet plan is less attractive than looking inward, trying to figure out how the affliction has affected my life, how it interacts with my other shortcomings, and what if anything I can do about it. In addition, I have been told that the postings in which I'm talking about myself, my emotional condition, my constant, one would like to say Homeric, battles with depression and insolvency, attract more readers and more comments than anything I might write about the color of the new Concerta formulations (less, for all the relative frivolity, than the issue of whether there should be blue M&Ms, for example.)

But there's a point where I don't want to write about myself. Or, more accurately, want to but feel uncomfortable. After all, I'm sure you're all very nice, concerned, ethical folks. I'm sure the snickering I hear is generated in my own head, and not in yours. But self-revelation has a price, especially in this age where privacy has, for all intents and purposes, become a rare, perhaps non-existent commodity.

So I'll continue to try to find a balance between my personal situations and my obligations to my ADHD blog, and if I find it necessary to lie a little here and there, so be it. None of you will ever know the difference, except for a handful of people who know me personally, and, for the most part, I've managed to alienate them sufficiently that they don't care.

I'm just sayin', you know?

Why ADHDans Make Poor Poker Players

It's difficult enough for my ADHD brain to remember what I'm doing, let alone what five or six other mooks are up to.

I was diligently studying Latin; OK, I was watching some tournament poker over the weekend when I realized that in a treating ADHD blog post last week I'd discussed the hardships an ADHDan faced when playing cards. My point was that given our ADHD impaired memories, we were at a gross disadvantage, since being able to recall the cards which had been played was critical to all but the most casual levels of gaming.

True enough, but not the whole story. First of all, it's not just the cards that a good player remembers, but the other players. Poker players speak of a player having a "tell," some behavioral tic that he replicates in direct response to a given set of circumstances. For example, a player who's bluffing may sit there scratching at his ear, or drumming his fingers on the table (these are exceptionally overt mannerisms, but for our current purposes they'll serve). Given a good hand, the same player may sit as serenely as a lama, or carefully arrange his chips in even stacks.

This information only comes from constant observation and analysis, watching the actions of one's competitors and linking them to the situation that eventually reveals itself. Like all data recording, the value of these observations increases in direct proportion to their quantity and accuracy. And then, of course, one has to remember this stuff. There's no benefit to an "AHA!" moment, the realization that another player has just moved his glasses to the top of his head, or has started to suck on an ice cube, unless you can recall what he held the last time he did so.

I've come to terms with this, and that's why I don't play cards any more. It's difficult enough for me to remember what I'm doing, let alone what five or six other mooks are up to. And that's not even allowing for the possibility that they've totally fabricated a tell, and are planning on trotting it out, blatantly, at a critical moment, probably when you're trying to decide whether or not to go all-in.

Sucker.

PS: If don't think you have any tells, think again. All but the very best players exhibit them, and if you're reading this, Slick, you're certainly not in that category.

ADHD's Witty Slide Into Depression

With my ADHD brain, I start thinking about money, or age, or politics, and the next thing I know I'm composing epitaphs. For myself.

There's a poem by Dorothy Parker that I think about from time to time. Here it is:

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Ms. Parker was renowned for her wit, none of which I will present here. Look it up. She deserves it. But she's also a vivid reminder that "witty" doesn't necessarily have any connection with "happy."

I'd like to think that I've been witty at times about my attention deficit disorder. If nothing else, the odds are that I've been witty far more often than I've been happy. I usually shuffle through life, trying to avoid trouble, and I'm usually successful for a while. Then…well, you know the Krazy Kat comics, where Ignatz the mouse always bounces a brick off of Krazy Kat's head? That's me. I'm minding my own beeswax, trying to get through the day, when the bad stuff comes flying across the street and clobbers me.

That's not ADHD, that's depression. I don't know what does it, or why the meds don't always go 'Shields up!' and block the brick.

If I had to guess, I'd say that at least in my case, which is the only one I'm qualified to speculate about, it almost always has a "cigar is just a cigar" trigger. I start thinking about money, or age, or politics, and the next thing I know I'm composing epitaphs. For myself. If it weren't so pathetic it would be comical.

OK, I can't resist: Ms. Parker and her cohort were fond of playing word games. Once she was challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, and, without missing a beat, she came up with, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." She was the unchallengeable queen of the "Damn, I wish I'd said that" although later in life she disparaged her fame at what she considered shallow intellectual follies.

Ever Meet an ADHD Card Shark?

I recently tried playing the card game hearts again - and failed miserably. Counting cards and ADHD, it turns out, do not mesh.

From time to time I find myself in a situation where my ADHD is so apparent, so blatant, that I'm driven to wonder how I ever got anything accomplished. Strangely enough, these situations aren't necessarily in the type of environment you might expect.

I've always loved to play cards. But this doesn't mean that I'm good at it. For years, I wondered why I wasn't more successful. It's not a lack of intelligence, or an inability to understand the rules or the strategic aspects of card games. Now I have the answer.

Months ago, sitting around, bored (yes, I know I could have been learning Latin. Sue me.) I started playing hearts online.

Hearts, for those of you who don't know, is a grossly simplified kind of bridge. Actually, the only resemblance lies in having four players and taking tricks. There's no bidding, no trump, no complicated scoring. What strategic possibilities the game offers lie largely in not getting caught with the queen of spades, or not letting one of the shnooks you're playing with drop it on you.

Not exactly like learning end-game strategies at contract bridge. Every facet of that game has had scores of books written about it. I can't imagine anyone so bored that he'd write an article, let alone a book, about hearts.

Anyway, the key to winning at hearts is to count cards, a skill which is crucial to virtually all card games, from gin to canasta to Texas hold'em. At the minimum, it involves keeping track of how many spades or hearts have been played. Optimally, a player should be able to remember not only how many cards have fallen in each suit, but which cards they were. My late grandfather, an utterly benign old fellow, was nonetheless a ninja at gin, and would sit there pondering his next move, disheartening you by muttering under his breath, "Nu, he took the six of clubs, the king of spades…" He could visualize every trick. You were a dead duck.

So I'd sit there, at the beginning of every hand, telling myself that this would be the breakthrough deal when I'd turn myself into a good card player by remembering cards. Any cards. Some cards. I'd get my hand and the play would start. I might note at this point that hearts, not being rocket science or bridge, doesn't require enormous thought. Four reasonably competent players can go through a hand as fast as they can work their mouses.

So I'd start. "Four clubs; three spade, one diamond; three diamonds, and one club makes five; three spades, including the king, makes six and one club now makes six…" You get the idea. Three tricks in, I find that I've got zero-nil-nada-rien-GORNISHT!!!!! in the way of data rattling around my head. So I play a high diamond, the player to my left gleefully lets the queen of spades fall, and I'm back to square one.

This isn't a sometimes thing. It's an every time thing. I can't hang on and keep track of the damn cards. I hate myself for losing games that I should win, just because I can't retrieve some simple information. But it never fails. Two tricks in, I find that my rebellious brain is working out variations on the coming season's Yankee rotation.

So what's the answer? Simple. Stop beating my head against a brick wall, stop wasting time doing something that my flawed mental operations will never permit me to be good at.

Amo, amas, amat…

ADHD Resolutions: A 2009 Gut Check

This year, I didn't wait for January 1. Now, just five days into 2009, I can take inventory of my New Years Resolutions with some pride, some disappointment, and lots of ADHD.

A month or so ago I had the audacity (or stupidity — take your pick) to post my resolutions for 2009, and I want to take this opportunity to review them, if only for my own benefit.

Strangely, the results aren't as dismal as I would have guessed. Here we go:

1. Walk to and from work every day (total of four miles, burning about 500 calories): In progress

I was pretty much on target with this one, striding bravely through the heart of midtown Manhattan. Some outside forces, like crowds of tourists (I work about halfway between Herald Square -- Thanksgiving parade and Macy's windows -- and Times Square -- just being Times Square, and then the hordes doing recon, scoping out the best place to hang for New Year's Eve, an exercise in self-abasement no rational being will partake of). A problem with my neck and some lousy weather contributed to my use of public transportation.

I still do my perambulations when the weather is decent, and will continue to do so. Especially if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority goes forward with their threats to raise the subway/bus fare to $2.50 a ride.

2. Join and go to Taoist Tai Chi: In progress. Plan is to attend classes Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday

I'm very happy with this one. I found that not only did I feel better, much better, in general, but that my neck pains were much diminished. In addition, I found that my inability to learn the forms wasn't so dire after all, and I'm pretty much on schedule to gaining a basic knowledge of the 108-move set within three to four months. Great stuff. You'll be hearing more about it.

3. Resume Eternal Spring practice, since it turns out that, no surprise, Master Chu is right. Most older folks don't have the leg strength or balance to do tai chi chuan properly, and nei kung develops these two qualities effectively.

Started doing this on alternate days with the Taoist tai chi, and found that there's a definite synergy. Again, not a surprise, since Master Chu teaches that learning either tai chi or nei kung without the other is a mistake. Of course, he also teaches that you should be doing Taoist mediation as the third part of the troika. I'm trying to figure out how to fit that in.

4. Latin

This may go south. It's a lot of work, and provides little additional benefit. I'm sad about this, but I can't waste time and I'm not very optimistic.

5. French

Whatever time I gain by not slogging through Latin paradigms, I'll devote to French. I was fluent once, about four decades ago, and I think I can regain this skill fairly easily.

6. Learn to play the drums: A real long-shot.

As imagined, a real long shot. Still in the starting gate.

7. Write more, and sell more of my writing: The most important.

Working on this. I have a plan in mind, but I have to get it off the ground before I'm willing to put it up here.

All in all, not a bad situation. My intention is to update this monthly, so that I'm forced to look at my accomplishments and failures, a salutary exercise.

Happy 2009.