Je me trouve sans temps

It's been so long since I've formally studied French that I can't promise today's title says what I intend it to say -- "I find myself without time" -- but ... well, there you have it. :)

I've been busy with a load of things. Medical school, Pokémon Heart Gold, drawing practice, medical school :p , and more.

I picked up woodcarving as a hobby. I intend to pursue it further once I can secure some decent wood to work with. Lafayette only sells oak (too hard), pine (too splintery, fragmenty, and overall shitty), cedar (too hard), and maple (too hard), and they sell them in industrial-sized beams for home repair and house construction. Nobody sells blocks of wood that are 12" x 12" x 12" nor 6" x 6" x 6", and 100% nobody sells them in basswood/linden/limewood or in other whittler-happy woods. As I think you can tell, thus, from this paragraph, I have tabled the hobby for now. But not without heavy heart!

I bought a lot of craftsman tools I'd always wanted and had on rare occasion needed for one thing or another. These include: a handsaw, two saw horses, sandpaper of various grains (60, 80, 100, 150, 220), a power drill (only goes 1" deep though), and workman gloves (sorta like biker gloves except with the fingertips of the glove still intact). I have used all of these tools at least twice since purchasing them: once for fun, and once (or more) for practical use.

Matt predicted the result of splitting the blogs only too easily: it becomes a psychological burden on both my part and on your part. Me, to have to split the entries between the blogs and to decide where which updates should and should not go. You, to have to check between several of them when you find me unreliable for frequent/consistent blog updates and you're left to wonder if I've just gone quiet or if I'm posting stuff that you're missing and I'm posting it somewhere else. So, I think I will be doing away with those. But not just yet. A, I'll leave them up still. B, I may still use them for now. Because C ...

My intention is to look into replacing the weblog with a webforum. I've mentioned this before, and I think it's really called for.
(a) I can categorize my interests better -- or rather, I can segregate my already-categorized interests by allocating a forum for each one.

(b) It will facilitate conversations on older blog posts for longer periods of time when warranted. (e.g. Sean will commonly write good replies but nobody sees them, sometimes not even me, because they're often submitted 5-7 days after the blog update first goes up, and by that time it's been bumped off the front page [on a conventional blog]. Having a webforum would do much to rectify this problem, i.e. to empower Sean / to ensure people give his replies their due attention.)

(c) It will allow you, the readers, to post links to pictures and to music and to other such things, as well as to format your posts with mock hypertext, in ways not always open to you on traditional weblog services like Blogger or WordPress.

(d) It will empower you, the readers, to be able to converse with one another with or without me, something I've always wanted both for you here and for myself on all the other blogs I go to. I don't like how Keith exists in his own "Ryan's Purdue but not Zionsville friends" bubble, and how Sean, Matt, Jay, and Ben are in this "Zionsville" bubble which also excludes UPNetwork Blaise and Rebecca. I don't like it for your own guys' sake, and I don't like it when it happens to me whenever I visit your guys' blogs (or other people's blogs, too). I think a webforum is intrinsically more democratic than is a weblog; and as such, it should allow you guys to get to know each other better.

(e) even though it will be my blog, I intend to have at least one forum there for the purpose of Miscellaneous Discussion where anyone with an account is free to start threads. (Otherwise, I'll start threads and users will have posting privileges for replies only.) I might change my mind on that eventually (and morph it into a fully-fledged webforum), but for the time being, I'd like it to have some sense of "Ryan's diary" as opposed to "Ryan & Pals', mostly Pals', Hangout".