View From the Bushes

Red Bull has these really annoying commercials -- so annoying that they have prevented me from ever even merely considering the purchase of a Red Bull energy drink. Not that I buy many energy drinks; I worry about my health enough without going out of my way to cause an arrhythmia. However, they have hopefully given some people out there an slight understanding of the legend of Sisyphus(for a more accurate overview go here). The idea is that this guy is doomed to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom the minute he gets to the top, so that he has to start all over again. It's sometimes frightening how closely this legend is a metaphor for my life.

Although I think to truly map my experiences, the legend would have to include around a dozen boulders, all of which I am trying to get either higher up the mountain or to stay in one place for a minute while I push on another boulder. And of course, there is the whole business of the boulders rolling to the bottom of the hill and with several boulders, sometimes it feels like it's a hailstorm as everything goes to the bottom simultaneously. Before I go much further, I don't want anyone to think that things are going poorly. No one has died, I still have a job (albeit one which is more monotonous than I would prefer). All of my kids are healthy. I'm not broke, homeless, in chronic pain or ugly (though some may disagree with that last point). Roberto Heras, my pick at the Vuelta, is probably not going to win, but he should at least be on the podium. With that in mind, let's move on.

I stopped by the Jewish World Review today (I'm an unapologetic Thomas Sowell fan), and the webmaster for the site had a letter up, talking about some heart problems he had experienced back on August 17th. He mentioned that the JWR site is a one-man operation, and that in the beginning when he had said that he was going to "put his heart" into it, that he spoke more truly then he knew. DireKobold is also a one-man operation, and for a while there, I was more or less trying to publish on the same schedule/level etc. as Dungeon while helping to raise four kids, working a normal 40-50 hour a week job, and sleeping. After doing that for many moons the boulder rolled to the bottom of the hill. Once it was there I decided to leave it there for awhile and take a break, and a good long look at what I was doing how much of my own money I was sinking into the project and everything else.

Thus the restructuring, thus the free month, thus the lack of any recent adventures, the slow publishing schedule and a reduced presence on some of the boards (most notably ENWorld, though my own have suffered a little bit as well). But never fear, another adventure will be here by the end of the month (though when I say the end of the month I pretty much mean the end of the month). Things have settled down in other areas of my life and I'm ready to start pushing the boulder back up to the top. Things are going to be changing here at DireKobold, but hopefully for the better. As always you can e-mail me with any comments, compliments, complaints or death threats, and I'll do my best to make things right. I may have more to say on this subject or I may not. As ever I am your humble servent:

Ross