Where Things Stand

...or sit, or stagger. Take your pick.

But the current surface-skimming state of affairs - or at least what comes to mind - is this matter-of-fact update:

D. works.
I work. I drive - about 100 miles a day during the work week.
The girls are in school.
R. plays soccer and rides when she can. She also volunteers with a local equestrian therapy center.
S. dances, and was just put in a good role in the Nutcracker. She also continues to make progress with her bass, that fog-horn, cow-lowing instrument that I've come to enjoy listening to while I fold laundry.

I don't write as much as I long to, and lately I feel that this not-writing-ness is less a casual burbling stream outside my window than a full-throated river quickly gaining speed as it crashes toward the sea of Lost Opportunity. And I'm tired of walking along it or sometimes putting a toe in the bracing water. And I don't want to build a bridge. Instead, I want to dam it and channel that power into words on the page, words on the screen, and Something of Worth (intrinsic worth, mind you - not just that false worth suggested with capital letters). Otherwise, what's the point?

Worse than writing without any spirit in the words, worse than writing poorly, is wasting the drive to write.

I think I want the writer's life. I could be wrong. But I'd like to test the theory more than I have in the last year, anyway.