You know I love you baby. I wouldn't leave ya. It wasn't my fault.

Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD. *

Alternatively titled. Okay, so I lied, I didn't get back to a seminormal posting routine momentarily.

Alternative alternatively titlte. Why people like phin shouldn't be allowed to interact with the general public, reproduce, buy houses or do anything else that requires wearing anything other than boxers and occasionally a t-shirt.

Really, honest even, I didn't ever intend to take as long a break as I did, I just got, um, busy. I haven't really be away from the intertubes, I've just been else where, like here and of course here (but I've been missing from ab.com for a while too) and designing.

So where else has phinny been?

Well do you have any idea just how easy it is to acquire an extra house payment? Me, I didn't, at least until back in March. Apparently all it takes is making one phone call to the bank and signing a couple of forms. At least that's all it took for the wife and I to buy another house. Yeah, another, because we hadn't sold ours yet. Kind of a wee bit stressful considering we couldn't afford two house payments, but we couldn't afford to let the house we bought get away either. Ahh, never ending debt, the American dream.

Luckily, within a week of closing on the new house someone made an acceptable offer on the old house. Which was also bad because they wanted to close in ten days and we hadn't finished (really hadn't gotten started good) on the minor remodeling we were doing with the house we'd just bought.

Oh well, it all worked out in the end, there were just a couple of months when I was playing remodeling contractor at nights and on the weekend. The withdrawals from the paint fumes are the worst part.

I caught the phinlet huffing an empty paint can he'd stashed under his crib several weeks back, honest. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd have shared with his old man, but he was bogarting the damned goods. So I put my superior physique to work and wrestled the can away from him. I might as well use the weight difference to my advantage while I have it right?

Between buying the house and now the phinlet turned one and is now 18 months old. Really it doesn't seem like that long ago we were in the hospital, times fun when your having flies or something right? I was hoping that I'd at least be able to match wits with the little guy until he was 5 or 6, sadly that ain't happening. I image its rough being outsmarted by the fruit of your loins when they're teens, I can attest to it being a major kick in the whozits if they're barely walking.

So, now that the house is kind of sort of done, for a while, and the number of design projects I have going on is manageable, I'm back, at least until I disappear again, which shouldn't happen, at least for a while.