I've taken a bit of an extended hiatus from many of my online writing gigs. I could claim that it's because I was busy or something, but the reality is that I pretty much just stopped writing much of anything of substance. Call it laziness if you like, but I think I'd be more inclined to call it boredom. I mainly just got tired of writing, because there was nothing new to write about.

This isn't to say that I haven't seen interesting things; there's still plenty of oddities about Seattle that I could be writing about, for example. But most of my writing was all on the same topic, and I got tired of that. This tiredness crept into the rest of my writing life, and slowly, I just stopped.

I'm not sure if I'm back or not. I know that I should be writing. I know that it's good for me. I just don't know if I can make myself do it.

No one will be surprised by the fact that I never could commit to NaNoWriMo, now will they?

I don't like getting up at 6 a.m., but sometimes it does have it's perks.

I leave my apartment every morning a little before 7 a.m. to catch the bus downtown. I don't start work until 8 a.m., but I've always preferred to get to work a little early, when there is typically no one else there, and get settled in before actually beginning my day. I also despise being late, and since I am reliant upon the bus, it makes more sense to just leave earlier in the morning, just in case.

This morning, it was still nearly dark out when I stepped outside. I could tell by the color of the sky that the sun was beginning to come up, but hadn't quite made it yet. When I got to the first street I had to cross, I looked east, towards the mountains. The colors nearly took my breath away.

The mountains below and the clouds above were dark, almost navy blue. But that tiny little margin of sky at the horizon was the most amazing mix of purples and pinks that I've seen in a long time.

I'm eating my lunch at my desk, and all of the sudden, I hear the sound of a drum. Not just any drum, a big drum. A bass drum, from the sounds of it. It is soon joined by the sounds of other drums, making me think "drum line."

Because we're on the 3rd floor of this side of the building, I can see the sidewalk across the street, but not the one on our side of the street. Of couse, the drum line isn't going to be on the other side of the street, because they've got half of the sidewalk over there blocked off for construction. So all I can do is sit here and listen to the drum line, without seeing it.

Now I have to sit here and wonder why they were marching down a city street in the middle of the day. Did someone forget to tell me there was a parade? Or is this just a totally random event, like many things on this street tend to be?

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I've determined that the fog in Seattle is actually low-lying clouds. Of course, my fiance tells me that all fog is actually low-lying clouds, but if that is true, the clouds at this elevation are different enough from the ones I knew before to be unusual to me. At the same time, however, they have some of the same effects.

Fog has this annoying tendency to "fog" up windows--the moisture in the air condenses on the glass, and you can't see out your car windows (for example) without running the windshield wipers or otherwise removing the cloudiness.

It's definitely fall now; I can smell it.

It's hard to describe the smell of fall. It's crisp and clean, but, at the same time, there is often an underlying scent of decaying leaves.

The smell itself is almost cold, but it's not like the cold smell of winter, which is probably freezing the inside of your nostrils while you smell it.

But there's usually a day when you can identify the fact that it's fall, all by the smell in the air.

That day was yesterday in Seattle, and I think I'm glad for it. It means more rain, and less sun, but it just feels right for this city. It also means that if I wear a heavier jacket in the morning, I will probably be able to wear it home as well. Even in July and August, I had to wear a jacket for my walk to the bus stop, but by the afternoon, I wanted that jacket banished far from my sight. Temperate weather is what I'm looking for, and I think that's what I'm going to be getting.

I was surprised to discover earlier today that I was all caught up on everything.

I'd finished the last of my articles for Shop Etsy, and had nothing else that I had promised to write. I'm participating in a craft fair this weekend, and I've gotten all that I can done for that. And my fiance was taking care of the household chores while working on his homework, before I came home from work.

I'm used to always having things to work on in the evening, and there probably were a million things that I could have done with my evening, but instead, I chose to be a lazy bum.

I'm not sure that I liked it. I've been tired for the bulk of the evening, and I think it's because I'm not really doing anything productive. I looked at stuff on eBay and Etsy, and spent some of my hard earned money, earned by my writing.

Tomorrow, it's back to making unrealistic to-do lists, just to keep me from getting bored. I'm dangerous when I'm bored.

I haven't had much to say here lately, probably because I have found myself with an overabundance of blogs. I've revamped www.scarywhitegirl.net to be all pretty and shiny. I've been working on the articles that get posted on www.shopetsy.blogspot.com. I have quasi-blogs on LJ, IndiePublic, and We Love Etsy. And now I've got something like a quasi-blog on Gather.

All of this writing, of course, has me thinking about writing in a general sense, and what I can do to improve the quality of my writing. I think I've definitely made improvements in cutting out so many ellipses and abbreviations in my writing, which may not be a massive improvement of quality, but does make it less "net speak" and more "English."

But then there are things that I can't quite get. We had fog in Seattle the other morning, and I was trying to come up with a good way to write about the fog, and what it was like. Instead, I wrote this down:

I work in a very nice building in downtown Seattle. The lobby is really a work of art, in my opinion, and I enjoy walking through it every morning and afternoon. It definitely lends a very classy atmosphere to the whole building.

About my only complaint about the layout of the building is that our offices are at the opposite end of the floor from the restrooms, which means that any time we hear the call of nature, we have to take a bit of a walk to answer. I suppose this isn't entirely bad; it does give me a good way to get a bit of activity in, and keeps me from being tied to a small area for the entire day.

I originally looked at this article on MSN because my brother and his family live in Chicago. But as I scrolled down and found the map of where has gotten a lot of rain, my eyes naturally fell on southern Illinois, the place I lived for almost nine years. Not a drop of rain.

Typical, I think. Southern Illinois always seems to defy all logic, so it only makes sense that some sort of protective bubble has gone up to prevent rain from falling in that area. Of course, another thing about southern Illinois is that it's always humid, so all that rain in the Midwest has got to be making it unbearable there right now. 90+ degree temperatures, 110% humidity, but no rain in sight.

And people wonder why I left...

We've got a birthday in the office today, and this one is a big production number. The honoree has decided to order in lunch for the whole office, so we will all be stuffing our faces with food and treats at noon... and probably for the rest of the day after that as well.

Of course, in return, the rest of the office wants to do something nice for her. Which involves me having 8 balloons "hidden" under my desk. I put them there, thinking it was a fabulous plan, and that no one would ever see them.

When I walked back to my desk, I realized that they're all right there, and all you have to do is glance under my desk to see the bright yellow ones, right on top.

It's no wonder I've never planned a surprise party.