Update @ 23:10: Please send an e-hug to Indi.

I was out gala­vant­ing around the other night, as I often do (ha), and I saw her. My hands clenched them­selves into fists, I tensed up, and I started hyper-ventilating.

Stark ter­ror.

I had to get out of there… fast. I scur­ried away; I think, before she had even seen me. Out of Dodge, and out to the Pontiac.

And then… a calm­ness washed over me, like a warm rain, or even a nice hot shower. As cold as it was that night, it felt as if there were some­how a warm breeze in the air. Sur­real, indeed it was. And yet, it was incred­i­bly cathardic.

For what rea­son I don't really know, I just started thinking…

I've spent months, per­haps years, attempt­ing to for­ge­tand put awayfeel­ings from my past about "failed" rela­tion­ships and bad expe­ri­ences; think­ing that what these things had done to me were harm­ful. The other night, I saw it with a… dif­fer­ent… per­spec­tive. By what­ever force com­pelled me, I did this kind of rem­i­nis­cent study of past events and feelings…

And for the first time (per­haps ever), I finally real­ized that I should be thank­ful for these feel­ings, these expe­ri­ences, these so-called "fail­ures". Again, finally, I gave credit to these points in my life as help­ing shape who I am now, for bet­ter or worse. In pon­der­ing this, some­thing helped me to see that as being pos­i­tive rather than negative.

I amfor the first timetruly thank­ful for this.

… As I was equally thank­ful for one of the best hol­i­days in recent mem­ory. Dan's fam­ily, as well as mine, joined us at our house for Thanks­giv­ing yesterday.

And actu­ally, it seemed to go off with­out a hitch. Nor­mally, I don't like play­ing Host, but it felt nice, for once. Not to men­tion, we've got food for weeks. Hehe!

On the tech­ni­cal side of things, I've been fight­ing a sort-of silent bat­tle behind-the-scenes against the evil, evil VeriSign, and specif­i­cally, their sub-company, Net­work Solu­tions. It goes like this: In 2001, I renewed my CHRISLANPHEAR.COM domain (which I first reg­is­tered with the evil, evil Namezero com­pany) and upon the renewal, I was offered CHRISLANPHEAR.NET and CHRISLANPHEAR.ORG as free­bies, I guess. Any­who, I bought all three domains.… and shortly there­after decided that I no longer wanted to use Namezero's ser­vices. Well, sev­eral months ago, the NZ ser­vice expired and, because Namezero reg­is­tered them (and not me), I was unable to get poses­sion of the domains to trans­fer them to what would even­tu­ally be the Smil­ing Peanut server. You see, in order to change the res­i­dence of a domain name, you need to autho­rize a change either from email or a web-based inter­face. Unfor­tu­nately, when Namezero reg­is­tered the .net and .org domains for me (ha!), they listed the con­tact email address as 'con­tact [at] chrislanphear.net'. Well, since this address didn't exist, it's been quite the ordeal to get these back. Well, fuck you VeriSign and Namezero! I finally did it, and .com/net/org should all now point to this here page. Whee!

Indeed, I have much to be thank­ful for. To those of you who know it already, I love you very much.