Feeling Antsy

I'm feeling a bit stifled, lately. Insufficient outlets for my creative nature.
Everything that I want to play with requires more spare time and energy
than I seem able to find. I miss building things. I find this sadly
ironic, and I suspect a few friends are thinking "I told you so."
I've been sleeping too much, and poorly,
which I attribute largely to Kirsten's 4:30AM alarm that goes off each
morning. I'm sure this doesn't help matters.

I've certainly made a few project attempts, but they've all kinda fizzled.
I took a quick look
at Loudmouth recently
for writing a Jabber bot, but I seem to be incapable of getting it to talk
to Google Talk, which is pretty much the only Jabber server I care about.
Some months ago, I wrote some VCard parsing code in Perl to help me get
my address book off of my Mac and into evite for wedding party invitations.
I got it far enough to suit my personal needs, but not far enough to be
worth releasing to anyone else. Once the itch was scratched, I put it
down, and didn't look back. Nethack was a nice diversion for a weekend
or two, but it's just a game, not a project.

A coworker taught me to drive a truck with a manual transmission last Friday.
(He's trying to get rid of the truck, and I mentioned that I needed a second
vehicle.) Learning to drive stick was quite the experience. Of all the
nervewracking things I've done recently (and I've done a few), I think that was
one of the most fun, in a totally juvenile
sort of way. I'm still not good at it, but I might buy his old pickup anyway.
I miss having a second vehicle, I'd like to have a crap-hauler (hatchback
or pickup), and it's just fun to operate a vehicle that requires so much
manual intervention. (Stalling if you don't hit the clutch when fully braking,
etc..) Maybe I'm just warped. It's a fun sort of novelty which appeals to
me, right now.

In completely unrelated news, two of our friends treated us to a lunch at
a fancy French restaurant named Bouchon in Napa Valley as a wedding gift,
last weekend. The food and the experience were both excellent. Probably the
coolest trip we've taken since moving to the West Coast. They want to make
a trip to the French Laundry sometime this winter, and I suspect we will
probably join them. Maybe I'll end up a yuppie after all....