So my grandmother died. I don't want to diminish the gravity of that statement too much, so I'll simply say that she's probably in a better place now, free from the various ailements and afflictions that weighed her down in this life. My father's father died when I was around 16-- about 16 years ago-- and so too has his mother now. Her failing health is only a slight comfort, as you might imagine.

I can't say that her passing triggered anything, but it certainly brought some things to the forefront. The chaos factor grew quite a bit in the second half of November, right up until I departed for my cruise vacation with Oum.

I'll write about the cruise in another post-- I also have some photos and I recently signed up with Flickr to try it out, so I'll make a little cruise picture gallery there. Suffice to say, though, that being on a ship in the Pacific for a couple of days and behaving like pure tourist does wonders to put some things into perspective.

I think one take-home message is to watch less news on tv. For about the month or two before I left, I had been watching an awful lot of news. Pre- and post-election coverage, some coverage of the Scott Peterson trial (I kept that to a minimum), Iraq, Terror, various things going on in my area in Phoenix, etc etc etc. I've even taken to leaving the news on all day so that if I happen to walk past where the TV is, I'll stop and see what's going on (one of the cons of working from home, no doubt).

Blissful ignorance of the so-called 24-hour news cycle is a good thing, as I had discovered in college when we lacked a television (though we did have one when Desert Storm started, which fueled our draft fears among other things). I didn't check email, read any online news, or listen to more than about 5 minutes of news on Wednesday night, and that was a step in the right direction.

Anyway, I've been re-writing some of the code for this site that I'd like to use in some other site ideas, using mod_python and the worker apache mpm. That's where things were a few weeks back, nad that's where I'm picking them up now. I've also got an idea brewing with a friend of mine from the silly valley days that I think will be interesting when we get it going. More on that later...