As I went down, I kept believing my foot would slide along the ice, out of harm’s way, but it never happened and my full weight twisted my ankle out of any normal range of motion.

Unable to put any weight on it at all, I had to crawl home through a greenbelt behind the block I live on, Finnegan leashed to my wrist.

The result is that I am still limping around and going to physio to repair the damage and hockey is off the list until at least March.

Every day that I think it feels better, something tweaks it and the pain returns, renewed.

I’m hoping my physio can get me back on track soon.

My infrequent posts hit home today when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and glanced at the new dashboard, which reported that I have:

• 34 posts, 5 pages, 14 drafts, contained within 22 categories and 0 tags.

Sometimes I spend hours trying to get a post to feel right, or just organize the words so that they make sense to someone other than myself. I have tried to ‘just write’ from time to time, but I end up editing, re-editing and occasionally removing posts altogether because I don’t like the way they read.

My friend Derek writes with apparent ease, sometimes multiple posts a day, and always very well written. As long as I have known him, he has been exceptionally well spoken and written, clearly evident in the fact that writes for a living. I remember years ago, working on his Apple IIc one night, we talked about writing.  He said that he has a tendency to “over-comma”, something I am pretty sure I do a lot.

Some other issues I concern myself over:

• I rarely use contractions when I write.  If you see any in my posts, it is likely because I have gone in and edited them to appear.  This gives most of my writing a very formal, wooden tone.
• For some reason, I regularly use the same word twice in a sentence, or in two back to back sentences.  I used the word “post” twice when writing about Derek’s work… until I edited it out.
• I tend to mix my tenses a lot.  In one sentence I say “he is” and in the next, I’ll switch to “he had”.
• I try to compress my writing into short, sometimes terse, sentences.  I don’t really know what that is – I usually want to get a lot of information out, but I find a hard time doing so.  I think it comes from my high school days when I was constantly being corrected for having run-on sentences.
• Similar to the last point, I find it difficult to include an aside mid-sentence.  That’s likely where my commas come in, but I have no idea how to use a sem-colon, a dash, an ellipsis to accurately denote my phrasing.  Frankly, I just guess.
• I am supremely tangental in my thoughts, which is evident on any first draft of a post.  I frequently have to move large amounts of text from one paragraph to another because they make little sense where they are originally.  This leads to a similar problem previously noted: two sentences with a common word close together – leads to even further editing.
• In my head, my writing is awesome.  This is likely my biggest problem.  Mentally, I know what I want to say, but that’s because, being my space, I have a huge collection of ideas that make total sense to me.  Organizing them into a sinlge written piece looks a lot less powerful on the page than it does in my brain.  This leads to me being frustrated because I feel like I’m not able to convey my thoughts accurately, which results in a percetion that my writing sucks.
• I think I repeat myself, or add too many modifiers to describe something.  The first modifier made my point, the second was unnecessary.
• I want my writing to be concise, but also interesting and full of the kind of detail that gives writing flavour.  However, these ideas are at odds with one another in my mind, and I struggle to find a middle-ground that works.  Frequently, I don’t find it.

These are some of the things rattling around in my head each time I try to put my thoughts into print.  Perhaps I’ll take a crack at those 14 drafts.

Here are some stats:

• 12: The number of drafts that are in my WordPress queue. I am having a tough time editing them for publication
• 7: The number of days per week I have more than 4 hours of my time scheduled
• 5: The number of books that are sitting on my desk at home, waiting to be reviewed
• 28: The number of hockey games I am scheduled to play before September 1st
• 4.25: The multiplier applied to my income to match the amount my home will cost me
• 2.6: The multiplier applied to my income to match the list price of a similar place in Langley
• 3: The number of minutes in my current commute to work (one way)
• 50: The average number of commuting minutes required if I move to Langley (one way)
• $40: Approximate monthly gas cost of my car today
• $550: Approximate monthly gas cost of my car if I commute to/from Langley
• 18: The number of students I have this term
• 60: The highest number of students I have had in a term
• 6: The lowest number of students I have had in a term

That’s all I can think of for now. Off to hockey.