It's a classic senerio that you first learn about in grade school, but you never really learn its effects until at earliest, high school, and sometimes it creeps up into your work life.

With me, it was Buhner.com. Buhner.com has been massively neglected over the past month and a half or so, and it's entirely my fault. The more I didn't feel like doing something, the more I put it off, and content kept growing and growing. Since the content grew, I knew that I'd have to write something larger than originally planned, and put it off because I didn't have the time. It's a Catch-22 (a real one), because I didn't have the time to write because the content was growing, but the content was growing because I didn't have the time to write. [Credit the Common Errors In English website for my bitterness with the term "Catch-22"]

So you say "Tom, you lazyass, you've always been lazy, yet you've managed to do updates in the past. What gives?" This is a fictional senerio, of course, because no one I know speaks to me about the site and about the updates and lack thereof, so IF someone were to say that, I'd say this.

I've been busy.

With what, you ask? Being clear cut, allow me to recap you the past couple of months or so, going back to around the end of July.

- Around the end of July, my aunt informed me that her tenant was officially moving out by the end of August. This meant that I could move to Bridgehampton (where we've wanted to "officially" be for several years) officially and join the Bridgehampton Fire Department. It also meant that our rent would be going down and going to someone in our family instead of some faceless corporation that owns apartment buildings.

- Around the same time, I got not one but _two_ jobs. Those who were following the 10 Job Challenge saw that it was actually successful, netting both the job with Hamptons Telephone and the additional East Hampton Star job. While the HT job was your traditional 9-5 job and the Star job was done on my free time, it led pretty much to me losing my Tuesday night trying to get all the material that people had sent me and put it into an article (using the trademark "Star style"), and doing something that I never wanted to do, writing because I _had_ to instead of writing because I was inspired.

- Once I started to get settled down in the job(s), we tried to move our stuff to the other place (very slowly, because the old resident took her sweet ass time) and tried to get out of our lease with the other place. Problem there? Our old place told us that in order for us to get out of our lease, they needed two months notice. In place of two month's notice, they would take two months rent. In addition, they wanted a month's rent as a sort of "penalty" for us to leave. Added onto that, they would keep our security deposit, which amounted to two more months of rent. That's five months. There is only five months left on our lease, so after going through every method available to see if we could get out of this royal screwjob (answer: no), we decided to continue to pay the rent. At least that way, we'd still be paying five months of rent, but at least we could get the security deposit back (therefore we'd only be technically paying three months of rent), and we'd also make sure that the place didn't get touched for the next five months. There's no reason why they should make money off of me paying rent on it and still be allowed to rent it to someone else, making the money again.

- On top of that, we got a bit more news: Tara is pregnant. We had been trying for quite a while, and finally, we got the very good news. Tara was excited, I was excited, and Tara's family was excited. My mom, on the other hand, didn't have the most positive reaction when she heard the news. Anything less than a positive reaction would have been negative for me, and the fact that she initially reacted negatively to the news (not even neutral, she was _not_ happy) pissed me off to no end. This was the first weekend of September, when we were supposed to finish moving in. What held us back though?

- I got food poisoning. Not as bad as my mom got it months ago, but I couldn't get out of bed. Overnight, I felt horrible (moreso than I'd felt in quite some time) and would have seriously considered going to the hospital had it not been like 4 AM (I wanted to call my mom's boyfriend to see what he thought). I felt a little better later, but the weekend was done, and we still weren't moved. Tara couldn't carry anything because of the pregnancy, and I had just spent a good 24 hours throwing up.

- It took several tries, but we finally got most of our stuff into the new apartment. It's still not all there, but enough to be comfortable. One thing that isn't set up though is my computer. In our old location, we had two computers networked together, sharing our internet connection and a printer. Now, with my computer in it's new location, it has no access to the network, and when I attempted to buy some CAT5 and run my own line, I discovered another problem: there's no outlets in the room/converted closet) that my computer will be in.

- Joining the fire department, which seemed relatively simple after a visit or two, became incredibly complex due to other parties that became involved in a simple process. Apparently, my residency was questioned by certain members of the fire department, and it took over a month formy residency to be determined and me to go through the proper processes to actually join the department. I've mentioned before the questionable actions of local fire departments regarding their membership, and it's good to see that it's still happening. I guess if you can't make it into politics (or aren't smart enough or rich enough to), your local fire department is the way to go.

So that's where we stand now. My mom has lightened up quite a bit about my potential son/daughter, so that's a positive. I'm in the fire department finally, and went to my first call today (granted, not a fire, but still pretty cool.) The electrician has been contacted, and he'll be here soon, so I'll be on my main computer soon enough. For now, know that I'm alive, and things are a lot better than they have been for quite some time.

Oh, did you want me to give you something for reading all that? Here's one of my favorite sites I've been reading recently. One of my pet peaves is the improper use of English, and this site points out some of the main examples.