Hello, I'm not dead. I am a bit more alive on Twitter than on here, because I am consistently failing to find the time/effort to compose a post longer than 140 characters. I'm sorry if anybody was mildly alarmed by last night's despairing tweet; it was just a late-night non-specific headachey emo attack. You can't say "despairing tweet" with a straight face, can you? Thank you to the people who messaged me kind things.

The main thing on the agenda at the moment is that addedentry and I are trying to buy a house. I wish I'd blogged that as we went along, as much for our own benefit as anything else, but I didn't. I did say a bit about it on Twitter, but for some reason the Twitter search won't show me tweets from before the beginning of May or thereabouts even if I explicitly set a since: date. Weird. We are at the surveys stage; addedentry is doing all the hard work, as always.

I am working hard at my actual job, though; I have finally achieved some kind of Procrastinator's Nirvana where so many other things are stressing me out that I can actually use work as a displacement activity from those things. Can anybody say "work/life balance"? No, nor me. Other things that are stressing me out are mostly a) low-level ill-health, and b) the state of the world, neither of which I can do much about. I'm doing what I can: tweaking ways to fix the symptoms for the former, voting tomorrow for the latter.

There is non-stressful stuff too: I am still running a bit, singing a bit, playing violin a bit, volunteering for Oxfam, decluttering a lot (but failing to write it up for unclutter_2009), and reading quite a lot. I have my books and my poetry to protect me. It'll be all right.