Its been a bit since I’ve written here. What started out as an effort to try to write something every day…and then every week…has slowed down to every whenever over the past few weeks.

It isn’t like I actually haven’t written anything. I’ve started a bunch of different things, but in each case I couldn’t ever get from the first sentence or two to the finished product. Each time I’d get a little more unhappy with where I was ending up and just decided not to write any further. (This is the all-too-familiar curse of feeling the overwhelming need to get something just a little bit better, just a little closer to perfect, before saying it’s done.)

Of course, I would always intend to go back and try to finish, but one thing or another got in the way and I just let things slide. There would be time to finish it up at some point before too long.

This situation isn’t unique, and I’m sure that if you are reading this, you probably can relate to this little slice of life in some fashion.

Fast forward to last Friday, when an incredibly powerful storm blasted across the area where I live and work, dropping a series of tornadoes down on the states of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio (or what we refer to here as the “Tri-State” area.) Our meteorologists at the television station where I work had been warning for a couple of days about how severe the conditions could get on Friday afternoon. Words like serious and unprecedented were being used. (One irate viewer wrote us a blistering email on Thursday to accuse us of just hyping the forecast to “scare old people who don’t do anything other than watch TV.”)

On Friday morning, we all learned a new acronym: PDS.

It stands for Partciularly Dangeous Situation, a special designation for severe weather watches that have the potential to become more than just a bad storm. But something much worse.

And it was.

You wouldn’t call a storm that produces multiple twisters, a swath of destruction across multiple states and leaves 39 people dead in its wake to be anything close to hype, would you?

There has been heartbreak to be sure, and now there are incredible stories of survival–and generosity beyond what many people have ever imagined. Small towns that have been scarred past recognition are trying to move towards cleaning up and healing up, because that is the only way that people can survive something like this. It’s the same way so many places that have had the wrath of nature cut through their everyday existence have had to cope.

And they are doing so across the Tri-State on this Monday night.

While fine–and unscathed personally–by the damage the tornadoes left in their wake last Friday afternoon, all of the events which followed have served to remind me of the painful lesson that loss always teaches: That no matter how much or how little you have, the one thing that you can’t ever get back is…time. When tragedy strikes and takes something away from the victims that emerge, there is always the gratitude for those lives that have been spared and a renewed appreciation for the time we have been given to go on with them and to not take anything for granted.

There is always a renewed appreciation for spending time on what is important with who is important, rather than whatever it is we thought was really important before.

Because that is what a tragedy teaches us. Even if the tragedy doesn’t directly touch us. We all can empathize, or at least we think we can, with those who have experienced the moment when their lives have been so fundamentally changed.

Forever.

And we vow that we will never take anything for granted, ever again.

Especially? Time.

So, its been a bit and there is a collection of random things that have been collecting on my mental desktop.

Time to drag those to here, and clean up the desktop to collect…well, more random stuff.

–The fact is, that Lorne Michaels didn’t ask me–but if he did, I’d tell him that the only people who should host Saturday Night Live are Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, any former member of the cast…and Justin Timberlake. (I know, the last choice is surprising to me too. But the guy has some serious comedy chops.) Witness last night’s terrific job by Maya Rudolph.

–That so many Windows users hate Apple products isn’t surprising. So why do so many innovations that Apple pioneers, end up in Windows computers? The latest being the rise of a class of thin and light Windows laptops called “Ultrabooks”. That look remarkably like Apple’s Macbook Air laptops that have been on the market for a couple of years now. Coincidence?

–Did the creators of the creepy Cars.com commercial where the guys “confidence” is growing out of his shoulder pay anything to the second “Men In Black” movie where Johnny Knoxville looked exactly the same way as an alien?

–Anybody else surprised by the news that they’re making a “Men In Black” 3?

–The ineffectiveness of words on a screen to convey one’s emotions never ceases to amaze me, fun little “emoticons” not withstanding.

–When will we give up on the penny as a coin and just round things up to the next even unit of .10? In fact, what if we rounded up every purchase by the few pennies to the next dime–and used that change to pay off some of the national debt?

–Shouldn’t the only voices heard in any discussion about contraception be those of women, since the last time I checked–they are still the only ones who can get pregnant in the first place?

–I could be wrong but it might not be possible to be sociable on every one of the social networks that keep popping up by the day. (Yes, I’m talking about you–Pinterest.)

–Am I the only person who is finding more and more that their favorite way to watch a television show is to wait until they have finished making a season and then watch all of the episodes in a marathon over a weekend? Sort of like a long movie, and you only have one cliffhanger to deal with at the end.

–If you were trapped on a desert island and you could only have one book, one movie and one album with you for however long you might be stuck there–which of each would you choose? And what do they say about you?

In case you are wondering–my choices are “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, “Citizen Kane” with Orson Welles, and “Sly and The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits”.
I have no idea what those say about me, I just know I could go back to them again and again and they still would make me happy. They all have for years.

OK, that’s all off the desktop. Time to start collecting more random stuff.