1. Busy Making Firefox Crop Circle
2. Dell Laptop Exploded / Caught Fire
3. Too busy with new house and/or new dog
4. Frequently washing/detailing new car
5. Excessive walking/jogging without computer/camera
6. Too much so-called "work stuff"

Today, using only one Talking Heads song ("Once in a Lifetime"), I will comment on each proposal:

1. I was not involved in the making the Firefox Crop Circle, though it's a neat idea and probably the first of future promotions for various products. Six degrees of blog separation: Crop circles were also featured on last week's episode of Eureka. The photo shown at right was used with permission from Penny Hero.

2. Although my company-issued Dell Latitude D810 Laptop does frequently refuse to shut down when the computer is closed and stowed, welcoming me later in the day with a fiery burst of heat when retrieved, something akin to checking cookies in the oven, it did not in fact burst into flames as happened to this really bad example of your standard Internet user (old man driving old truck, see also CA article).

3. Our house, being relatively new, has not offered up any large projects after the radon mitigation. Maya, the Siberian Husky is doing fine, and there are some new photos online though none in the past two weeks. And although taking care of her pretty much duplicates taking care of a newborn human child, fortunately my wife does most of this and she is not directly responsible for any lost blog time (dog or wife).

Yes, I bought a new car, though I haven't blogged about it yet. This is because after the new house and new dog I didn't want to look like , and maybe I had some guilt in buying an SUV. In reality, I don't know how we're going to pay for this shiny red SUV. At the time, it seemed like the right choice and used cars weren't much cheaper (and 5x the interest rate). For what it's worth, our 2007 Saturn Vue is very nice and it's one of the better ones as far as mileage (and hey, we would have bought the hybrid if it wasn't delayed until later this year!) However, having driven a sports car for 16 years, driving an SUV takes some getting used to. But in any case, frequent washings and detailings can't be held responsible for slow blogging either. ASIDE: It's funny how you can never buy a new car the "right" way. Meaning that you never have time to research or shop. It always happens when your car breaks down, which is what happened in this case to my wife's car two weeks ago.

5. I have been walking a lot lately, and even jogging (for a hundred feet or so). This is not as much due to health concerns or a want to lose weight (though I *am* down to my lowest since college, i.e. 1994). It's simply so scenic where we live now and they actually have sidewalks and bike paths to walk on (at my previous location, you could walk on the main highway with racing traffic if you didn't value your life). So, yes, I could credit some time loss to the daily evening or morning walk.

6. This is the real reason, simply a gargantuan pileup of pending projects here at AccuWeather. We're working on so much new stuff here it's incredible and every few months the wave of work needed to support this trend crashes down on my blogging schedule. I can assure you that I'll be back to normal today, though I should warn you that I will be on vacation from 8/24 to 8/30. I'll be at my Mom's house, and although she may be 12 miles from the nearest grocery store, she has DSL high speed Internet, so I don't expect an all-encompassing outage. Look for me on her front-yard webcam when the time comes.

Did you know? At the very end of "Once in a Lifetime" , there are undocumented lyrics:

Say, this blog entry was weather-related after all.

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