I Hope This Makes Up For It

I suppose I really should apologise for not having an entry prepared at the natural fortnight mark, but I won't. I'm not trying to be pompous or heaven forbid to ``act cute'', but I have a very good reason why there wasn't an entry prior to this one.

I was on holiday.

Yes, I shocked even myself. To think that I would break away from actual work for nearly two-ish weeks and to get away, and not to any place but back to America, that is something I wouldn't have ever thought I would have done back in the day.

But in a way, I had to. There was no choice about it whatsoever.

It was the last chance to visit Pittsburgh (and pick up some geocaches) before everyone that I know there is completely gone. It was [probably] the last chance I would visit Champaign-Urbana to come to a better understanding of where things stand between she and I, and more importantly, to meet up with my friends before they leave for San Francisco. It was a time to avenge the lack of running at the 10km race last year when I broke my hallux.

At this point though, I am just jet-lagged and want nothing more than to sleep deeply for a few more hours. I probably should have been less stingy with my leave and applied for another two or three more days just to stay at home to sleep and fight jet-lag.

I should probably write more, particularly about events that happened during my trip to the US, but those have been consigned to the diary already, and I don't want to rehash them here. All I can say is, I hope that the trip I made and the awkward conversations I had with her weren't in vain. If that were true, I would be a pretty sad person.

I could have written an entry earlier, but I had to content with myself playing the transcription and catch-up game for my story-[fragment]-a-day challenge. Around 15+ story fragments were written while I was out in the US, mostly done while on planes and on the train. Only a couple were written while I was in the apartment of my friends. There was still a shortfall of nearly 8 more stories, and those I had to cobble together over the past few days. I am happy to announce that as at now, I am again on schedule for the stories. The 15+ story fragments were written on a stenographer's pad, two lines to a ruled line, which worked out to be around 400+ words per side. That was a nice number for a story fragment, and I suppose I had written so many of these by hand that I have started to write at a ``natural'' 400-ish words per sitting.

And now, I shall collapse to sleep. Maybe when I'm feeling better I will write a more complete entry.