Email, surfing the 'net, reading online magazines, abusing rightwing ignoramuses, none of my former amusements amuse me any more. I'm just not into them.

It's work stress - I don't have time for a lot of daytime surfing at this job and almost always work through lunch.

It's friend stress - Gidget is much stronger than she was and actually able to drive herself short distances and whatnot, but her doctor's appointment this week found a new infection and they've changed her antibiotics and doubled the dosage, so she's a long way from "well." I drove out to her house on Sunday (27 miles!) to explain how to manage an advertising campaign. Then I took the data home with me and created it for her and uploaded it, to save her the exertion.

It's my own illness - I didn't realize until I actually started feeling better that that last virus had hung on for three very long weeks. I mean, sure, I knew that by 3:00 every afternoon, I was falling out of my chair with exhaustion, but I'm not smart enough to have figured out that maybe I was still sick. (Can you blame me? I mean, Vela and I were unquestionably taking enough abuse every day to justify feeling beaten with a stick after a few hours.)

Most of it, though, is Rapunzel's fault. My beautiful niece (well, one of my two beautiful nieces) recommended a DS game called Harvest Moon to me last fall. I put it on my Christmas list and, lo! Santa provided!

I can barely begin to estimate how many hours I've put into this game in the last two months. Conservatively, I'm thinking 250+. Almost every spare second I've had, that's certain.

The poor R.C., who actually owns the DS, got a new game from Santa as well, but she never gets to play it. I'm starting to think the $130 investment for a second DS might be wise.

If she takes her game box back, how will my chickens get fed? Who will harvest my crops? Who will give the little red-headed girl a present every day? Who will rescue the Harvest Sprites? Ohmigod, it hardly bears thinking about.

This game manufacturer produces games with an occasional tendency to freeze up and corrupt your file. I read about it in the walkthrough I found online. Me, being me, I decided to take my chances. And, yes, last week my file froze up. Six (game) years into it all, I had to start over. That's normally the sort of thing that would put me off a game permanently, but with this one I just paused to mourn the loss of my $99,000,000 (took a lot of fishing to earn that!) and started over.

Today we had Mandatory Fun at the office - a "healthy food" potluck lunch. I tried out a new quiche recipe that I wanted to take to a brunch on Saturday. It was a reasonable facsimile of a food-like substance. Would have been much-improved if I'd remembered the salt and pepper. Shrug. I might rethink the mushrooms, too. Mushrooms are good in quiche, but the color puts me off.

For those of you keeping score at home? On the work front, leads were up this February by 20 percent over last February. News like that will probably get me fired. (That is, if Jason isn't already contemplating doing without me after I told him last week that his new pet program has been a waste of money, resources, and the dwindling hours of my life.)

There was a whole thing around me being snippy at MadBoy in an email and being made to apologize to the world at large, but I'm over it and it's too tedious to go into detail about. (Basically, he bragged that his ability to spend $20 for online marketing and not get anything for it proved that I don't know what I'm doing.)

The news that we're not paying most of our vendors, any of our free-lancers, or even some money we owe to some of the Argonuts Afield does not inspire confidence about this company's future. I'm starting to hoard my pennies against the next bout of unemployment.

The economy is not this company's fault. However, Jason's tendency to throw $50,000 at outside consultants every time one of the 'Nuts questions a Home Office policy, instead of backing up his management staff is this company's fault. If we had the money we spent last year on projects commissioned from outside sources and then thrown away before implementation? We wouldn't be in financial trouble at all. We wouldn't have had to lay off staff and we wouldn't all have had to take a pay cut. (Which gives you a broad idea of just how much money we wasted last year.)

None of which excuses my decision to bypass working this afternoon in favor of blogging, but I hadn't updated in so long it was ridiculous.