Well I seem to have done it again. What's happened since my birthday? Quite a lot it feels like: the wedding I went to was pretty good, although I'm more excited for the many weddings this summer at which I don't have to worry about driving home, my littlest brother's among them.

There was still snow on the ground when I went to that. Spring is here, I've already mowed the lawn once, gathered up firewood (a firepit is on order: those things are deep magic), pulled weeds, removed a stump from the front yard like a mighty lumberjack ladies, seen my first rabbit, and found the four kittens a stray is raising under my shed.

I don't think I'm really a cat person, but I like cats enough to be considering domesticating these ones for adoption; supposedly it's hard work, but doable if they're young enough. There are ladies from the local cat shelter who are supposed to contact me about this whole situation, but so far no dice. Eight weeks is rumored to be the cutoff point so this is the closest thing I have in my regular life right now to a race against time.

At work on the other hand, there are some Deadlines approaching, and I've been doing and will keep doing some odd hours, which is good because I need the money to pay off home improvement debt etc., but bad because I remember getting fairly burnt out the last time I had a month like what I'm expecting from May.

Odd that you can tell sometimes when you're being dumber than usual. This hasn't been too much of a problem for me lately — if anything, these past few weeks an unfortunate tendency to stay in bed for 20 minutes or so after my alarm has gone off has let me think through a lot of stuff I needed to get a handle on — but even leaving aside all the thoughtless stuff I've said when I'm drunk, I think that sometimes Our Bold Hero will lose access to portions of his brain due to mental exhaustion.

I say "mental exhaustion" but I hesitate to use the word "stress." I remember high school and middle school and stress. That stuff was sweat and razorblades.

These days, like anyone else I'll use "stress" as a shorthand for any number of problems or issues I'm having, in order to eke out a few minutes of leniency from the world at large, but it's been probably 5 years at least since I couldn't sleep because I was worrying about something.

Even if most of my tiny little problems as a 20-something are probably a bigger deal objectively than the ones I had back then — they manifest as heaviness now. Heaviness can wait until the morning.

The issue is that, even though I've learned how to seal off the bulkheads so that my problems can't get to me like they used to, now I'm sealing off the H Deck and captain our men are still down there! I said seal the bulkhead lieutenant but sir that's an order yes sir. And so it goes: you get 3/4 Dan, half-Dan.

I remember right after I bought the house, being pretty dumb for a week or two because I was still trying to process everything and get everything fixed or setup or ordered, although I didn't really notice this was going on at the time. I would walk through Menards looking for something to fix something and the store may as well have been a foggy hedge maze.

More recently, I owed a bunch of taxes this year (forgot to change my withholding after my government house–kickback) and I eventually realized that I should just buy Turbotax because I'd shut down and I couldn't really trust my half-Dan math, plus I wouldn't really be myself until I'd dealt with the tax issue.

(Having to pay meant waiting until the last minute to pay, which was the core of the problem. Normally I file as early as possible and drink the equivalent of my anticipated refund that weekend.)

But it'll be summer soon, that wonderful, relaxing season where I forget how much I hate the winters here, and plus I think that even just being more aware that a dumbening (wait, that's not how you spell dumbening...) is happening should help to prevent a burnout this time. That's the hope at least.

OK, as expected it still takes me forever to write one of these, and longer than forever when I'm out of practice. I haven't worked out a system for blogging here yet, but I bought a new keyboard that actually works most of the time, so I'm gonna keep trying to post here. I've also started putting up smaller quick-hits of the more frivolous social stuff alongside notes on what I drank over at Dan Drinks.