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Being at loss of words lately, has led me down some strange paths of distractions, none of which ended at this blog. I’ve been wanting to get back in the swing of things for while, blogwise, but I’ve just found myself at a complete lack. Of interest? Of energy? I’m not really sure.

Yesterday I started a post and mistakenly obliterated everything I had written (and yes, I should draft my writing in a word program, but I don’t) when I was interrupted and failed to successfully hit ‘⌘ + T’ to open a new tab, and navigated away from my post page. Fortunately, I hadn’t saved anything (it wasn’t going anywhere worth while).

So, instead of starting over, I started mucking around with refining my search results page. They had been left half finished months and months ago.

Anyway, this leads me to my point. While making these refinements, I was testing a few random searches and one these queries happened to be for the term “hair“.

I realize I’m setting myself up to be shrinked, especially given the title of this post, but “hair” was simple and easy to type, and that’s why it came out. The title, it was simply carried over from the previous post (completely different topic, of course) I managed to lose.

Back to what I was saying, I was in all accounts, completely expecting my query for “hair” to return zip. But it didn’t. In fact, it returned 3 posts. Now that’s not a lot by any means, but hair, when have I ever written about hair? I was curious, so I checked. And what do you know, I was writing about hair. More precisely, about pulling my hair out.

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, but you might say it’s a sign. Vacation anyone?

There are times when you wish there was a clean, elegant way to go about a thing and there are times, as we all know, when this just isn’t possible. Such, is my state of mind at present. We all know what it’s like to take something that is beautiful and clean, and have to bend and contort it to work in environments it really shouldn’t be subjected to. Such is the peril of the web designer and developer. And such is the profound necessity of standards.

In times like this, I can’t help but wish we, as designers and developers, had something for our practice, akin to the good old tennis ball hack.

Without a doubt, I’m ranting about Internet Explorer. I know, it’s a tiresome subject, but we, nevertheless, exhaust countless, valuable hours contending with the legacy Microsoft left behind.

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I don’t write very much about my personal life on this site, but one of the few exceptions I’ve made has been for our rats Abbi and Addi.

This past weekend, while cleaning out their cage, I discovered that Addi had a lump under her front left arm. We made an appointment with the vet for Tuesday, to have it looked at. Given the particular size of the tumor, it was necessary to schedule surgery and have it removed. Unfortunately, they discovered the tumor was much worse than first expected, once in surgery. Addi held on for a couple hours after the surgery, but in the end, she just didn’t have the strength left. Addi passed away at 2:46pm, Tuesday, February 19th, 2008.

Lauren and I are devastated and miss her very much.

These pictures were taken just before surgery, at the Veterinary Hospital