I’ve been back from Texas for almost a week now and … yeah. Very hard to get plugged back in.

The trip itself was great. Lots of camping, lots of family, lots of food. I even worked in a run while I was away. And wrote about 4,000 words on business-y stuff, and a few thousand more on other things. And developed an addiction to Spell Tower for iPad. Good times all around.

One of the things I started writing while away was a story about the journey itself, which I think I have no other choice but to put up here. So look for that later this month. “Camping to Texas” is the title, and it should be fun.

As far as other writing, I have one more gaming-related feature story in the works at a major outlet. I’ll let you guys know when that goes up. They told me “later this year,” with all the specificity of a cable TV installation technician.

As an aside, and speaking of cable TV, I did finally break ties with Frontier Communications – sort of. My new 50Mbps Time Warner “Wide Band” service was installed just before I left for Texas and it is very, very fast. And so far the service has been about what I’ve expected from Time Warner, but they have yet to generate as colossal a customer service clusterfuck as Frontier, so fingers crossed. The Frontier DSL has been cancelled, but we’re keeping their landline telephone service for now. It’s hooked into our security system and we’ve learned the hard way that VOIP doesn’t work very well or reliably for that. Also, I kind of want to keep the account number active in case they do, at some point, turn things around. Maybe that’s a cop-out, but I prefer the term “diplomatic.” Aside over.

After that next story goes up, that’s it from me until next year some time. While I still can’t say yet what my new job is, I can say that in addition to being asked to not say what it is, I’ve been asked to not work anywhere else. Which, while perfectly reasonable, means I’ll be all but disappearing from the internet shortly and for an unspecified amount of time.

As far as the AAK Podcast, I’m slowly getting booted back up and hope to record a new episode this week sometime. Still a bit exhausted from driving 3,000 miles and all of the familial stuff that prompted that. Looking forward to unplugging again for my birthday (December 24th) and the Christmas/New Year holiday. Between now and then, however, I will do my best to get some AAK and other goodness up here.

As for what the new year holds … still don’t know for sure, but it’s shaping up to be awesome.