In life you need to be careful that you understand the price of things.

Work has been keeping me exceedingly busy these days. It's been a slow but gradually ramp up of things to do, but now I find myself completely out of juice when I get home. There's lots to do and I power up at the office to get things done, but the to-do list never seems to get any smaller. When I do clear out some space by finishiing something it invariably is replaced with a stack twice as high.

I'm not complaining. With my personality, I crave the challenge and power of this kind of job, but it does have it's price.

At home, I focus on the girls, the one I married and the two I helped make. They really don't care about my title or job or the latest project, they just want me to do the daddy thing and pay attention to them. Even when I think I'm out of juice, I crank up the reserves and try to get the job done.

Once they go to sleep, I have the brief time when I'm free. Stacks of crap surround my desk. A site redesign sketch lays untouched for months. Multiple projects await my attention. Rants that course though my brain on the daily commute don't get written. Even the escape of video games loses it's allure.

Not that I'm sad, but I notice that I've hunkered down. Scaling down life to the bare essentials: family, work, and a brief decompress. The world passes me by. Emails go unreturned. Phone calls don't get made. Friends grow.

So the cost of success appears to be losing track of many things. Today I realized that my best friend lost 100 pounds and I had no fucking clue. What the fuck? I mean I know I'm not good about keeping in touch with people. That's where Michele backstops me. But I mean really how can I miss out on something like that and it catch me unaware?

Everything in life has a cost, it just sucks that you don't always realize the price until you've paid it.