From memories fade the fondest days.  Had I known that this was the last before the parting of ways, would I have lifted the setting sun and held back forever the passing of the day.

Indelible moments etched in glass:

Crystal clear were your eyes, dancing with each happy sigh.
Careful mirth across your face, as those golden hours went too quickly by.

But even glass melts under the press of time.

Those precious memories, so sharp that day, melt now with each rising sun.  I grasp at each drop to lock it tight, but through desperate fingers those treasured moments fall to puddles on the ground.

Reflections of that cherished day evaporating under the unforgiving sun.  Away to nothingness go your warm embrace and that knowing smile.  With despair I rail against the fading of that fondest day.

To have met and laughed, and to have seen and admired from afar and near.  Then to depart the best of friends, with the brightest of beginnings, and the promises of infinite tomorrows.  But the promises will be left unfulfilled and those tomorrows will never be today.  The beginnings are the endings and the writer left with the ink still un-dried.  One comma out of place in the promissory note and we null and void the fairy tale before it's written.  To live and hope for the rainbow in the sky and fearful that it's just a chance illusion after all.

It has been another very difficult day at work.  The amount of ineptitudes that can occur within a group of very bright individuals is staggering.  The surface is all hustle and bustle, a slick engine of productivity all gears blazing forward like a bullet train.  But beneath the conductor's cap is a monkey.  Every passenger a monkey.  And the monkeys are all trying to figure out when the banana peel is going to drop.  So to speak.

Another trying day.  Another day when I wonder what I'm doing in my monkey mask.

Then I read Miller; his essay, "Patchen:  Man of Anger and Light".  And I am humbled again.  What well-fed monkey has a right to complain about his bunch of bananas when out there in the world are real men living a real life? fighting for ideals with fire, brimstone, and acceptance.

Acceptance that things are as they are.  Accept, do you as you will, fight for what you wish for, but accept the world as it is every moment that you are.  And what joy it is to come across a word that you'd forgotten about and to be reacquainted like long lost friends.  What joy it is to immerse yourself in a world of words woven with care, genius, and ideals.  It makes a monkey want to shave--the better to make pretenses at being a man.

I had a feeling it was coming, and it did.  My web host turned off my account suddenly yesterday.  I've managed to find a new host (GoDaddy.com) and get a few things set up but it'll be a long while before everything is tweaked to my liking.  I've lost most of my old content.  It may be recoverable but I don't know that I have the energy to do it.

Part of the problem is that I'm switching from WordPress (a Linux application) to blogengine.net (an ASP.net application) and the data formats are not easily compatible.  The reason for the switch is mainly that I want to experiment with an ASP.net web site.  WordPress worked well and was mostly easy to mantain and had lots of community support.  blogengine.net is newer, has less support thus far, but since it runs on ASP.net, I'm hoping that creating widgets and customization will be easier.  Time will tell.  One immediate problem was that GoDaddy runs ASP.net application at Medium trust level, which meant that I had to find a modified version of blogengine.net (http://www.van-zand.com/ModPack/).  Problem solved and here we are today.

I should be packing right now.  I'm headed up to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference.  I don't usually go to these things because you can't learn anything immediately useful in a one hour lecture and three days is a lot of valuable production time lost.  However, rather than hoping to learn something, I'm hoping to see something inspiring this year.  The realist side of me says that even if I am inspired, I can't apply that inspiration to my work because deadlines and production pipelines won't allow for it.  Nobody likes a realist though, not even the realist.