It's one of life's little ironies that our decisions are always based on multiple, competing restrictions. For example, I have a shload of projects that I'd like to work on. Back when I was unemployed and had plenty of time to work on projects (because there is just so much you can do each day toward looking for work) I found that many of the projects that I wanted to work on required a non-trivial initial outlay of moolah.

Now that I'm working again and have the moolah coming, I'm finding that many of the projects also have a large initial investment of personal time, of which there is a significant drought.

Yes, there is no doubt about it. I'll just have to win the lottery and retire if I ever want to get anything done around the house.

Ok, honest self-examination time here. I am beginning to catch my breath. 34 months unemployed does things to your work ethics — something that 4 months employed doesn't quite cancel out.

It didn't prevent me from performing my work duties; in fact, I slipped back into the University mode pretty easily. I.e. I don't complain about the long hours after 5 p.m. during a week when everyone is trying to get their poster presentations ready at the last minute before flying off to their conference. I know that I can get that back in short days while everyone is away or in time spent mostly taking it easy or reading back issues of Linux Today.

Where it afflicts you is when you discover just how hard it is to get things done after hours or on the weekends. It's strange how easy it is to get in a mode where you think, “It's dark outside so I ought to be at home winding down for the evening.” And you realize an hour later that it's only 7 p.m. and you could have been getting things done.

It's pretty pitiful that my New Year's resolution has to be something along the lines of “I will start working on projects around the house even if the first one has to be building a remote-controlled ‘my own butt’ kicking machine.