About ten days ago, we had a particularly beautiful, warm day, and I took some photos, expecting to use them in a journal entry the next day. But something else came up, and I never used the photos. So I've been saving them up for another beautiful day. But we ain't had none - it's been frigid this week, and it even rained the last two nights. Early this morning, it was still cold and wet, although there were some beautiful clouds on the horizon.

I didn't expect to have time this weekend to write a journal entry. It's been another crazy week, and I thought the weekend was to be more of the same. But my body informed me last night that it wanted some time off: it made this announcement in the form of a sore throat, and, this morning, amplified its complaint to the level of a cold. Okay, body, I hear you, and I agree - it's time for some down time.

This week I realized what luxury I'd had in the preceding weeks, where work had been slow enough to give me time to work on my own little extracurricular projects, such as my movie script. Not so this week - the big project in Marin that's been idling along for a few weeks now, suddenly came dramatically to life late last week, and this week was all consuming.

It's been a lot of fun, though. It's a joint venture with a four year-old startup firm. What started off as a project to install features of some of our software into our partner's website has now evolved into a much bigger project, in which this partner will also use our software for some of its internal data-processing. And I've managed to weasel my way into being the main contributor to the project for our company.

What's exciting about this kind of project to me is the feeling that I'm on truly firm ground with these people. I'm working as part of a team, with their people, and I'm bringing to the table an expertise which they need, and of which I know myself to be master. It's fun to sit around with practically a blank piece of paper and plan out, with the rest of the team, a software architecture from scratch. It gets at the heart of what I enjoy about software development - building something that works, coming up with ideas, organizing information, making order out of chaos.

Oh, my job search is still going on, though. This kind of project is a rarity for people in my position in our company, and I was lucky to get it. Even now, my boss is trying to get me off the project for political reasons. Like most large companies, we're dysfunctional, and I'm amazed that we manage to muddle through to significant growth each year. Over the long haul, though, politics or no, the direction the company is moving in is not for me, which is why I'm continuing the job search, albeit at a very low level: automated job-search agents on the big online job-boards like Monster.) No bites yet, however.

It's funny to think how depressed I was about my career just a few months ago. Back then, it wasn't just that I didn't like my job. It was also that I had so much free time at work that I had time to sit around and mope, and get depressed. The difference now, apart from the obvious difference of working on an exciting project, is that I realized that the free-time at work gave me the opportunity to follow some of my other dreams. I'm really starting to take the movie-making seriously. Next week, I start a short film class at what I like to call the Harvey Milk Institute of Erotic Arts. It's actually something like a gay community college, in the Castro. It just happens that about half of their courses are what you might call "non-standard". A couple of examples: "Introductory Bondage for Lesbians", and "Introductory Blood Play for Women". I really never knew lesbians were so raunchy. If you're interested, you can sign up at www.harveymilk.org, but please, don't hurt yourself!

I've put the filming of my movie on hold until after I've taken this class, since the script is now getting too ambitious to be filmed effectively with my current level of technique. After that, who knows? Maybe I'll enroll part time in film-school, somewhere down the line. Assuming I get over my current tendency to feel overwhelmingly sleepy by 8.00 p.m. in the evenings.

There's no question that now is not a good time to be looking for a job in the Bay Area. The dot-com explosion was truly centered in San Francisco, not Silicon Valley, and it was here that the most obvious effects were felt, both of the boom, with the fancy new restaurants and outrageous property prices, and now the bust, with many people out of work, and rental prices dropping. The other day I walked past a half-empty restaurant in the cute, bricked, old streets just East of the base of Columbus, which had been jammed the lsat time I'd past it, in the late Fall. And just this week I heard that the dot-com I'd thought of joining about 18 months ago just laid off 75% of their workforce.

I think things are going to get tough here. The energy prices are going to push marginal firms out of business, particularly small mom-and-pop affairs such as laundries, and bakers. Prices for everything from dry-cleaning to lattes and car-repair are going to shoot up for the rest of us. Meanwhile, the state's tax base is going to all but disappear with the sudden absence of cashed in stock options. Grim days ahead, I think.

I feel sorry for those laid off. Many of them were young, and gave up jobs in established companies to be part of the exciting high-tech boom. Now they've wasted a year or two of their careers with nothing to show for it. I don't feel so sorry for the people who founded the bust start-ups. They were just looking, mostly, to get rich with borrowed ideas, or business plans for commodities nobody needed, and they didn't care who they damaged in the process.

Alright, now it truly is time to rest and recouperate. I'm going to lay myself down on the sofa and vegetate, while drinking gallons of hot tea. I've been saving up things I've recorded off TV for a couple of weeks now, and I can finally catch up with The Sopranos. I only started to watch this show recently, and only on account of the overwhelming critical praise. Now I know what I've been missing; liberated writing, complex characters, multiple layers of meaning, no pat sentimentality. Some of the best television I've ever seen. Not that they have much competition, mind you.