Tonight I understood that things were Really Going To Work. As in, were Really Going To Work, in the cosmic, hit-over-the-head fashion that's completely impossible to ignore in the way that things like the success of internal-combustion engines are hard to ignore. True, everyone but me has known that things were Really Going To Work for a good deal of time (and have been waiting on me to see the obvious) but about an hour ago, I finally got it:

Was today a good day? I'm unsure. I spent far too many hours beating on code, and at the end of the day I had very little actual progress to show for it. Judging by the line numbers, something around an even hundred lines of code today. But they're good, solid lines, and they really and truly work.

The conversation with Heather, shortly after a breakthrough:

Right.  So.  Another day of coding, y'see.  Did you know that after a day of messing with things like timezone conversions in PHP, your brain takes on the consistency of mashed potatoes?  It's pretty impressive, in a frightening and appalling sort of way.  Much was accomplished today.  Quarto is intended to be based off of GMT (ok, ok, UTC), but I wanted to convert the GMT timestamps to whatever the administrator chose as 'local time.'  The only place that I'm leaving dates in straight GMT is in the usage log.

To Gareth:

I'm trying to figure out what I'm in the mood to listen to today.

eh, screw it. I officially declare this as yet another snarky Steely Dan Day.

It's never a good sign for the rest of the world when I declare something like this.

Oh, right. Hi, everyone. Miss me yet? I decided to stick to my guns and not post for a couple of days. If any of you had actually come over to the house and seen me, I would've attributed the muscle tics, verbal glitches, and general twitchiness to Quarto.

Ahab had his whale.
Quixote had his windmills.
I have a content management system.
But I will finish mine. 

A year ago, this was a quixotic task; something to be talked about in the realm of what-if with Jeff on a trip to Birmingham.  A movie—one or another—after all, we see many.

"What if," he said, after listening to me go on for quite some time, "you wrote something yourself?  Have you given that any thought?"

Well, it would be, if I had one left. Really. Last I saw of it, it was marching out the door with a suitcase and a beer, muttering an obscenity-laden set of phrases that sounded like "See you later!" and taking my code with it. That was after the cats napped on it for an hour or two this morning.

It was, apparently, squishy and warm. The cats like that.