I know, I know. I’ve made promises before. I bet if I looked (and I won’t) I’d find the ratio of “I’ll try to blog more” posts to actual substantive posts is, shall we say, “skewed.” In my defense, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Mainly, building the business: www.MyTruckBuddy.com. Until recently, if I wasn’t devoting 16-20 hours per day on it, our only source of income, we’d have starved. Well, maybe we wouldn’t have starved — I never did rule out shaking a tin cup at some intersection — but it would have been tough. For one thing, I would have had to cancel my Internet access.

As it happens, starting a small business from scratch takes a lot of work. Had I known how much work, I probably would have mooched off my parents until I found a nice, decent, safe job. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t have been proud of it, but my default activity in the shadow of crises has been to run and hide and hope the problem goes away. But, I was ignorant, and eventually I was pretty ticked off at getting knocked down, and I was stupid enough to keep throwing myself in traffic. The result: a fairly successful little business that is by no means finished, but at least pays the bills.

So, there’s that. There’s also the kids, Joseph and Kolbe. Joe is three now, and Kolbe is nine months. Same problem there: had I known how much kids are…

No, I wouldn’t have avoided kids. No way — especially after these years with them. But yeah, they take up a lot of time. A. LOT. OF. TIME.

I have been doing a little bit of blogging at the company’s “off-campus” blog. It’s mostly pointless drivel that attempts to drive up my page rank. So far: mission unsuccessful. Serves me right for trying to game Google.

What have I learned since my last post about a year ago? Oh, several things:

• Persistence pays off better than genius. Like I said before, the biz is a lot of hard work. My informal poll reveals that most successful business owners aren’t more intelligent or gifted than everyone else. In fact, they might be a little bit on the slow side because what makes them successful is their infuriating inability to stop after someone says “no.”
• Words are powerful. We’ll get into this a lot more, but it’s a scary realization. An off-the-cuff sarcastic remark, or a stupid little joke, or a random thought given voice can set off a chain of events that wound or cause people to do things you wish they wouldn’t.
• People will screw you any way they can — but you can’t expect them to. A German efficiency expert told me that, basically. When you expect to run into thieves and morons all day long, you will. The reason is so simple: we never make ourselves wrong. This goes along with “words are powerful.” What we say we tend to believe because we never make ourselves wrong. Likewise, if you expect people to be thieves and morons, (and vandals — more on that later, really!), every person you meet will be a thief, moron, vandal, whatever.

Et cetera.

So, however you came across this blog, stick around. More to come!

Yesterday I helped a guy from the U.S. Patent Office pick up and deliver a couch. On the drive back to his place, I asked him what he thought was the coolest invention he’d come across. Since he works in the division that deals with environmental stuff, I immediately forgot what it was. Then he said, “I know, it’s not like the adult toy department.”

“There’s an adult toy department in the Patent Office?” I said.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t a very talkative sort.

“So,” I said, trying to fill the silence, “If some ambitious pervert working in his mother’s basement invents the Penetron 3000, improving on the Penetron 2000 by increasing the battery life or making it more ‘green,’ he’d then submit a request for a patent?”

“Yup.”

I was still blown away.

“So, there’s a whole division dedicated to examining the workability of sex toys?”

“Uh huh. It’s kind of hidden. It’s under the ‘Massage and Health’ Department or something like that.”

“So, there’s a whole group of people who, when asked what they did that day, say things like ‘Oh, I approved six patents for six vibrators, but I had to deny a patent for the Penetron 3000. Too much fire.?”

He lol’d.

If any of you are right-wing extremists like me, don’t worry — this isn’t funded by taxpayer dollars. The Patent Office is the only federal agency that’s entirely fee-funded, or close to it, my customer told me.

Consider yourself learned.