So. August.

Recently, I picked up a temporary part-time job helping out at a local college bookstore for a few weeks. I did this for a variety of reasons, partly because money has been a little tight, partly to see how a part-time job would impact my freelancing schedule without a lot of commitment. What was supposed to be a 12-hour-a-week job when I applied for it is shaping up to be more like 25-30 hours a week, so how it’s impacting my schedule is: a lot. That said, and as is inevitably the case, work has also picked up, and August is already looking to be a very busy month for a handful of different reasons. These two things together are putting a strain on my free time, to put it mildly.

Something more is going on, though. 2015 has been a rough year. Not exactly bad, necessarily, at least not all the way through, but rough. Lots of exceptionally good things mixed in with lots of exceptionally bad or difficult ones. I think I’m just now starting to really get the distance that I need from the things I learned and experienced at the beginning of the year in order to really understand the damage that it all did, and that’s taking some adjustment to get used to. Which I guess is all a long-ish way of saying that, if you don’t hear from me much this month, don’t worry too much about it. If August does manage to kill me somehow, I’ve already left instructions on social media for my corpse to be propped up in front of the computer so it can try to finish my deadlines, Weekend at Bernie’s-style. More likely, I’ll emerge from the other side of this month as I have emerged from most everything else up to this point: Battered, perhaps, but ready for another round.