Blog fodder

There are times when I have absolutely no enthusiasm for blogging. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. And then there are times when the urge to write is so strong it's like a physical ache. Not ever having experienced withdrawal symptoms, thank God (well... not counting caffeine withdrawal which I've gone through on three separate occasions. I don't suppose a mild headache really cuts it as 'withdrawal'), I imagine that this nagging emptiness combined with the need to do something without really knowing what is about as close as I'll ever get to dependence on 'substances.'

The fates often play a cruel joke on me by giving me lots to write about on those days when I don't feel like it, whereas on the days when my enthusiasm knows no bounds there's nowt to write about. So during those Times of Limited Energy, when subjects present themselves, I make little notes under the general heading 'Blog Fodder' so that I'll have some material for when Mr Muse returns.

And then, being a disorganised sort of chap, sometimes those blog fodder notes get a bit lost, and don't turn up 'til months later. Now you begin to perceive where this rambling is taking us. Back to November 2009, when I made a note about a daily horoscope that was particularly apposite:

"In the midst of a sea of change, you decide that the more routine you can make your day, the better. Doing some tasks in a familiar manner now helps you relax, while only last week they made you bored and restless."

Which I found passing strange at the time, as I was engaged in the TENTH recasting of the deployment schedule for the project I was working on. Dates had kept slipping, and obstacles kept presenting themselves. Servers weren't ready, or had disappeared owing to incorrect DNS entries, or the admin password had been lost or corrupted, or the patch levels were wrong, or the management priorities changed and now we needed to do applications BEFORE firewalls, etc, etc, etc. Only the week before, as the horoscope rightly reminded me, this constant change had been doing my head in. But on the day in question, I distinctly remember thinking that the only thing I really wanted to do was sit mindlessly shifting rows about in a spreadsheet because it was a simple, familiar task too close to therapy for comfort.