I can’t believe it’s been almost four years since my last blog entry. I think I foreshadowed that in my first few attempts at journaling my life, some nonsense about how many things I start but quit sometime soon thereafter: exercising, diets, etc…

But here I am four years later. What’s become of my life? I still eke out a few hours a week of time for the things I used to enjoy: playing my Xbox 360 or some silly PC game, browsing the internet (usually WinCustomize or LifeHacker), watching a few (really good as of late) TV programs.

But it seems I have even less time for these sorts of things than I had when last I complained about it on this site four years ago. And so much has happened. My wife and I had a little girl two years ago, Gabrielle Morgan. My life certainly changed after that (but that is something I will not complain about; any and every sacrifice is worth it when my daughter looks up at me and says “I wuz you daddy”). She’s a handful, well into her “terrible twos” six or so months early, and a master of them now. You can certainly tell what words or phrases she was most used to hearing from my wife and me, since those are the things she says now with a skill that would make an auctioneer jealous: “No”, “Get down”, “Stop”, “Back up”, “Quiet”, “Not now”, “In a minute”. But, “I love you” (the aforementioned “I wuz you” from above), “Please” and “Thank you” are also in her vocabulary, which eases the guilt a little.

A year and a half ago, I moved my family back to the town my wife and I grew up in, Charleston, SC; or rather, the company I worked for (at the time) for eight years moved us back here so I could take a job at a new location they were opening up. It’s good to be back, although I think this place has grown too much too quickly for its own good. But we have friends and family all around us now, which is great (most of the time). And it’s nice to be back in familiar territory.

Three months ago I lost my job with the company I’d worked for for almost ten years. I let my anger and frustration get the better of me at work one day (it should be pointed out that I was three days into trying to quit smoking at the time...). After dealing for an hour with a particularly insane customer, I walked back behind a wall and threw a broken computer part across the room and under a shelf, which was, unfortunately for me, witnessed by one of my employees who had an axe to grind because I’d written him up earlier that day for being late. He went crying to my boss, and actually used the words “created a hostile work environment” in the conversation. Three days later I was history, ten years of investment of my time and energy down the tubes. And if you think it’s easy to find another job when you have to explain to a potential employer why you were fired from your last job, think again.

So now I have a job I hate, doing something I loathe, and dealing with people I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole if given a choice. And I make far less doing it than I did before. The next person that says “Everything always works out for the best” within ten feet of me is likely to get pummeled fiercely.

But life’s not all bad. I love the house we bought down here, and it even isn’t in a half-bad neighborhood. And my daughter can make me laugh and cry all at the same time (which is more fun that it sounds). My wife is back at work, managing a convenience store (and finally understanding all the frustrations I dealt with on my job for the past ten years; very gratifying for me). I just leased a brand-new Mazda CX-7 (right before I got fired; I’m not that foolish), and I absolutely love that car. All in all, life could be far worse.

So that’s where I’m at now. I can’t really complain (except for what I complained about above, that is). And hey, Impulse is out, IconPackager lets you bulk-recolor icons, ObjectDock is as cool as ever, and at some point WindowFX will work on Vista. So life is good.