Awakened at 2:00 AM by nature warbling outside my window.

My first thought was coyotes. They’ve been known to wake me up with their midnight laughter. But this was more plaintive, less mocking. My wife suggested skunks. My second thought was prairie dogs; their yelping and barking have woken me before as well. But this sounded more… feline.

Like a skunk, my wife said. Like young skunks.

So maybe it was skunks. I shook my fist out the window and wished they would just spray things quietly and let me sleep.

My arms are cross-hatched from my time in the rose bushes this weekend. The scratches are long, thin red reminders of why I haven’t trimmed the bushes back earlier, and why I should wear a long-sleeved shirt for such projects.

It strikes me as more than a little wrong that the best way to take care of these rose bushes is ruthlessly trim them back. It makes me feel like an abusive spouse: I only do this cuz I love you, baby. I know what’s best for you. You’re getting too big for youself; you need someone to keep you in line.

No wonder I put it off.

In other news, it’s Monday! And that means a new update for the Worth a Thousand feature. This week’s entry, Storm, could have just as easily been called Dust… and my apologies if you need to drink a big glass of water after reading it. Actually, you probably don’t drink enough water, so I don’t apologize. In fact, go get a drink of water right now; stay hydrated. And read Storm. After all, I know what’s best for you.

Since yesterday, I’ve been suffering a vaguely guilty, gnawing sensation, and I’m pretty it’s from not blogging yesterday.

It’s not my fault, I tell myself. If I had anything remotely interesting to say, I would have written it. But peering into the barrel of thoughts worth sharing, I came up with nothing but scraping: the new grass, talking about the weather, a random story about E3 — from a year ago.

Still. You should write something.

Fine. Since no one who doesn’t have to look at it doesn’t care about the new grass I’ve magically summoned to fill the bald spot in my front yard, I’ll talk about E3… a year ago.

It was my first E3, and I was suitably impressed. Hundreds of video game companies filled the halls with their loud, raucous displays. BizDev types in suits cruised the aisles like sharks in shoes, while fanboys in black t-shirts lined up to see the New Hotness. And after the show closed, the parties were… legendary.

I went off on my own one night, leaving my too-tired-to-party compatriots to their own (mostly sleeping) devices. The next morning, I regaled them with my adventures.

“I ran into some Korean developers,” I said. “They didn’t speak much English. But they needed directions, and I helped them out. They said they were going to a party, and invited me along. We ended up in some industrial meat-packing district or something. I think. It smelled like raw meat. But there was this nightclub, right in the middle of it. Small, exclusive. There were meathooks on the walls…”

“Really?” asked my companions.

“Nah,” I said. “I just got some ice cream and went to bed. But it was a great story, wasn’t it?”

I took my eight year-old daughter, Thing One, down to the game room.

“We’re going to play a game this summer,” I said. “An adventure game. With dice. And math. We need to work on your math — especially your subtraction. We can do this… or flash cards.”

She said she preferred a game. With lots of dice.

I opened the RPG closet and revealed 20+ years’ worth of my collection. She thumbed through the Farscape RPG… Dawnforge… Castle Falkenstein…

“I like fantasy,” she said. And then, reading sideways off the spine: “The… World of… Darkness. What’s that?”

Uh oh.

That, I did not tell her, was a book so full of adult themes and language that I could not let her read it. That was a game of vampires, werewolves, and broken people, soaked in angst and gore. That was, aside from KULT, the least kid-appropriate game in my collection.

“It’s a horror game,” I said. She flipped through the pages and admired the moody, dangerous artwork.

“Cool,” she said. “I kinda like being scared. I want to play this.”

I might be in for a very interesting summer.

That title there? That’s sarcasm. More on that in a bit.

First, I’d like to point out this week’s Worth a Thousand entry, The Knight’s Tale, based on some super-sweet artwork provided by Patrick McEvoy. Give it read, tweet it, share it, and spread it around like a cheap paperback with a well-thumbed page 124.

I would have doing this pointing yesterday, but…

On Sunday I got a panicky e-mail from my web host anxiously informing me that, while they’d love to automatically charge my credit card and renew my domain, the card on file is expired and time is running out.

Well. I wasn’t about to let one of the the dozens of squatters just waiting for a chance to snatch up darrellhardy.com do any early bird-style snatching, so first thing Monday, I hopped on and updated all my info. That must have flipped a switch somewhere on the mothership, resetting everything, because within the hour this lovely front page was replaced with a nasty “The owner of this site is a looooser” placeholder. How embarrassing!

Long story short: Problem solved, domain secured for another year, and the mothership has been reassured. Everything’s okay now, mother. Go back to sleep.

I’m finding it harder these days to string more than a few dozen words together at a time. I blame Facebook and its cramped status-update field. Perhaps I should blame Twitter for its even tinier allowed character-count, but I’ve been on Facebook longer — and besides, it’s fashionable to be hating the FB right now.

Oh, the fiction is long enough. That is, it’s as long as it needs to be (about 1000 words per story these days). It’s the non-fiction update — the very definition of a blog post — that turns me taciturn and crimps the garden hose of metaphor that I use to feign wittiness. I check the mental notes of my day, looking for events of passing interest to people who aren’t me, and find myself skipping over anything that will take more than a sentence or two to write. Just the thought of putting all those words together one after another, laying them like bricks in a wall of text, is exhausting to to Facebook-crippled brain.

“Too long!” my inner critic rants. “Didn’t read!”

My inner critic is apparently something of a troll.