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It’s freezing in here!  I swear the only heat in the place is from the friction between my fingertips and keyboard.  I’ve typed furiously all day, but it’s a big place.  No one can type that fast.  I’ve decided that my only refuge is the comfortable chair, wrapped in a blanket, watching a movie.

I’ve rented just about every movie the local shops have to offer, so the pickings seem to be getting thinner and thinner.  Last year, at the height of my low time (that’s a good one), I would sometimes watch three or four movies a day.  It seems impossible, but I assure you, it can be done.  I became a movieaholic, pouring them into my brain as fast as my eyes could watch them.  A chain watcher - I’d pop open the next case before the movie I was watching even had a chance to finish.  DVD’s are great - no rewinding.  It speeds up the whole process and makes the movieaholic’s life so much easier.

I had a good reason for becoming a movieaholic, but I won’t get into that right now.  Let’s just say that tonight’s pick, Down With Love, couldn’t be a more excellent clue.  What an evening.  Wrapped in a blanket freezing to death while watching that squinched-faced Renee Zellweger fall in love with the dashing Ewan McGregor.  The box promises that the sparks will fly me to the moon and back.  Great.  Just what I need.  The even more intense cold of outer space.  I better get two blankets.

I just came across a site that posted a list of clear and precise bylaws for all to read.  The particular writer, who I will not reference out of sheer fear that I will have violated one of his bylaws, was of course, a lawyer.  Who else would have us reading fine print on a page already bloated with fine print?

But I think I’m forced to agree with the idea of his bylaws, no matter how desperately I want to smart off.  Maybe I’ll adopt them myself.  You know, to keep my own direction as clear and precise as a practicing attorney.

Maybe I should decide to offer no legal advice, just like him.  This sounds easy like an easy bylaw to keep.  Kind of similar to my Speak No French Rule.  I can do that.  Matter of fact, I can do even better then that.  I can crank it up a notch, I think, and will boldly proclaim my first bylaw:

I will offer no advice.

Now that’s a bylaw!  I decided the only appropriate thing to do was send our nameless attorney an email.

Dear Sir:

As for your other bylaws, we can discuss those in detail when . . .

And that’s when I stopped writing, realizing that I had already broken my own bylaw.  Broken it before I had even had a chance to officially post the thing.  Can an attorney I don’t even know sue me for breaking my own bylaw?

Blogging, I’m finding out, is tricky stuff.

I’ve crammed as much computer knowledge into my head as I can for one night.  I’m reminded of the torturous French class I was coerced into taking one summer, as my deceptively cruel alma mater dangled a degree just beyond my greedy little hands.  It’s only three semesters of French crammed into four-hour classes, five days a week, for six short weeks, they said.  You can do it.  My advisor, bless his now dead heart, only smiled when I told him the plan.  His gray, bushy eyebrows lifted in obvious lack of faith.  The man had no time for foolish students who insisted on walking straight into the mouth of disaster.  He said nothing, but his eyebrows kept on climbing right up his forehead, distancing themselves from me and my impending doom.

The difference between computer code and French is that there is no logical way to attack French.  So I would just fill my head up with as much as I possibly could, then hurry to class and hope that a respectable amount of it would come pouring back out.  I felt like I was literally trying to regurgitate my way into a degree.  I’d stumble out of the room after the four hours, holding my throbbing head, vowing that I when I’d clumsily muttered ”répété, s’il vous plaît for the one millionth last time, I would go cold turkey.  No more French.  Abstinence.  Not one more syllable.  I was the original anti-French patriot, and I didn’t even know it.

My vow was easy to keep.  As a matter of fact, I am French-free ever since.  The language poured in so fast, that I’m afraid not a bit of it stuck.  If it did, it’s lost in there, and I’m not about to go looking.

Well, just like my French class, I sucked up everything I could tonight about rearranging blogs, figuring it would come spewing back onto the page with just enough orner et la beauté to earn me a passing grade.  And now that my night is winding to a close, I can see that arranging nearly incomprehensible code is not a whole lot different then learning French.  You breathe it it.  You breathe it out.  And then you push the “Publish” button and hopefully forget everything, because if you fall asleep and start dreaming the stuff, that’s when you start to get a little cranky.

So if anyone would like to put in their two cents worth regarding the design - feel free.  But don’t do it in French.  Just because I wrote a couple of phrases only means that I know my way over to Babblefish.

I am a firm believer that when things look their bleakest and all hope seems lost, you will hear the sound of the cavalry off in the distance, rushing to your aid.  Maybe I watched too many old westerns as a kid, where the good guy was always the white guy, where anyone standing in the way better step aside, because truth and justice and all that was right was about to come blairing across the prairie behind the sound of a bugle.

Okay, I agree.  Nothing much has changed.

But I did hear the sound of hope this morning, as Keith (yes, we’re everywhere) of random thinks took the time to answer a distress email I had sent out only yesterday afternoon.  Or maybe he never received my email at all, but simply saw the smoke pouring from my test site, as I struggled to master the art of drop down lists.  Anything is possible.  My son, roaring around the house for two straight days in his underwear, refusing to get dressed, terrorizing and destroying the order of the house, was looking very much like a wild renegade to me.  We were very much under siege.

But whatever the reason, Keith’s email came charging across the hill and into my laptop, led only by the soft, soothing twinkle of the email arriving bells.  No bugle sound at all, just a little ding, ding, ding, DING.  I guess something has changed afterall.