His tummy gurgles, as he lovingly crafts his Blogger post

I mean stomach! Guts! Crap factory!

For various reasons that I can’t go into, I really feel like blogging right now. Unfortunately, as is often the case, I have nothing to say. No pictures of Post-It®-covered desks, or interesting factual tidbits from my life. No book reviews or movie reviews. Especially no movie reviews, because I haven’t seen a movie in a while. (We have The Constant Gardener ready to go in our PVR, but haven’t had time to watch it yet. Not to mention two or three movies I recorded that I know Andrea won’t want to watch, like Beverly Hills Cop, and Transporter 2.)

I came across a bunch of interesting web sites today, most of which I can’t post here. (They’re not dirty or anything, just not appropriate for this blog.) I can post this one, though, which has a bunch of videos answering Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge.

If I may indulge in some self congratulation, I must say that I prefer my blog layout to many other peoples’. Not all other blogs, by any means; there are a lot of very creative people out there, who have done a fantastic job laying out their blogs. But there are also a lot of other people out there who have put together really badly designed blogs, and I think they outnumber the people who did a good job. (Not including, of course, the people who simply took default templates from Blogger or LiveJournal or whatever blogging site they use. Of course, even some of the standard templates are pretty ugly.)

I find my layout (and fonts) easier to read than a lot of the other ones out there. It’s not, I know, very artistic. Just very functional—which was what I was going for when I put it together. Many of my readers may find it boring, which I can’t blame them for. But it does put the focus on the words, rather than the background image, and million links to other blogs, and fancy flashing banner graphic, and myriad other things that other bloggers put on their blogs. When you come here, you don’t have to search around to figure out what you’re supposed to read; I think it’s pretty self-evident. (It also loads faster than a lot of blogs out there, since it’s mostly text.)

For lunch today, I had probably the unhealthiest collection of food I’ve consumed in a long time. I hope we have something decent for supper tonight, or my body is going to hate me more than it already does. On the plus side, though, I haven’t done too badly with my morning exercise. I haven’t been out every morning—and I took the week off when I was on vacation—but for the most part, I’m doing okay.

The drawback, however, is that I’m going out early enough that I’m noticing that the sun is just starting to come up—whereas a couple of weeks ago, at the same time, it would have been up already. Similarly, I went out at 8:30PM this week, and it was already starting to get dark, whereas it would have been nice and bright at that time, a couple of weeks ago. All this adds up to one thing: The days are getting shorter, which means the warmer weather is getting ready to depart. Which makes me sad.

Soon we’ll have to start dressing warmer. The warmer months are almost gone, and not once have I sat out on my front porch, with a beer, reading a book and enjoying the weather. Okay, to be fair, that’s not something I’d be likely to do anyway. Probably a bad example. But in any event, I don’t feel that I’ve enjoyed the warmer months as much as I could have. But I guess my mourning is premature; August isn’t even done yet, so I still have some time to enjoy the fleeting warmth Toronto has to offer.

But soon Construction Season will be over, and Winter will be upon us again. Warm months, do not go gentle into that good night! Rage, rage against the dying of the… um… warmth.

Oh, and one last thing: I used the phrase “of course” four times in this blog entry. And I call myself a writer! I need to enlarge my vocabulary.