Apologies are in order.

Monday morning, as I was driving back from Atlanta after a day of fun-filled awesomeness that included my very first NFL game, it occurred to me that I'd whiffed on that day's Monday Morning Cage Match and the last two Friday Random Ten+5s. I do have something approximating an excuse: I spent the second half of last week in West Virginia for my granddad's informal memorial service/ash-spreading, and the week before that I was frantically boxing all my stuff up and trying to get it moved out of my apartment by the end of the month. So it's been kind of a crazy few weeks ever since I got back from Dallas, and I've had to let a few things fall through the cracks here and there.

What I don't have an excuse for, though, is the fact that the quality of the stuff I have put up here has declined markedly over the past couple months, and I really can't disagree with anyone who suggests that my heart really hasn't been in it lately. It's been a rough summer and fall for me, and having to move back in with my parents has been one more depressing thing to stack on top of a growing pile of frustrations. It's not that I don't get along with my parents, mind you -- we have about as great a relationship as a mother, father, and son could have -- and it's certainly not that I don't appreciate their willingness to take me in and give me a home base from which to decide what I'm going to do next. It's just that . . . well, I mean, I'm 31 years old. On the list of things I was hoping to accomplish in my thirties, this wasn't one of them. I'm extraordinarily blessed with a very loving and supportive circle of friends and family members who have continued to support me and who haven't treated me as radioactive just because I'm back under my parents' roof for the time being, so I've got that going for me, but this is still a detour I was hoping to be able to avoid.

So in that sense, yeah, I've been depressed lately. That's not exactly a new development -- it goes back a good ways before I got laid off, even, and only recently have I really taken stock of how I've let it affect my life and keep me from doing things that I actually want to do. But one of the things that I enjoy most in life is writing for this and other blogs and hearing people's reactions to what I have to say, and I've done a disservice to more than just the people who are kind enough to devote some of their time and attention to reading this blog -- I've done a disservice to myself by not putting as much effort into it as I could be.

And I'm going to try to do a better job of that in the coming months. Obviously I still can't promise that this blog will be the #1 priority -- holidays are coming up, for one thing, and oh yeah, I still have to hunt down an actual job, the search for which has been lengthy and involved. (On that note, I've had interviews for jobs at Clemson, Virginia Tech, and an ad firm in Birmingham, but unfortunately haven't been offered any of them, so the hunt continues.) But even with that in mind, I think I can do a better and more energetic job of keeping this thing updated than I have been lately.

So I hope you'll accept both my apologies for having fallen down on the job a bit and my humble requests for your continued patience and understanding. This, too, shall pass, but even in the meantime, there's no reason we all can't try to laugh at stuff. And I'm going to do my level best to do a lot more of that.

Thanks.