A coworker stopped me the other day: “You have been busy,” he said, “you haven’t been blogging.”

A quick look through the history of my blogging will show a lot of varation in frequency of posts and a general slow-down in recent years (only some of which I can attribute to Twitter), but it’s still true: I have been busy, and I haven’t been blogging because of it.

Not long after I started the new job, we started in on a professional services engagement with an identity management architect, to help validate (and correct if necessary) the direction we were going and to help lay the foundation for future work. What we’re doing is huge, and we want to make sure we’re doing it right. The next couple months were unrelenting weeks of nothing but day-long meetings and preparation for those meetings. I take issue with the methodology — it’s fair to say that a death march is just plain wrong — but it’s over now. More or less.

And I am exhausted.

I spent the latter part of 2006 writing a book. It didn’t work out for various reasons, but at the beginning of 2007 I looked up and realized that I had been nose-down for months, doing very little else with my free time except writing, and I had no idea what had been going on. It was disconcerting. Disorienting.

That’s how I felt at the end of this project, like I was just waking up from a long, fitful sleep. I had spent so long with such a rigidly controlled schedule that I wasn’t sure how to organize my time. It’s taken a while to sort that out, but of course it’s not like I’m lacking in any way for work to do, so I feel like I’m getting in a decent rhythm again.

Just in time for the Republican National Convention to come to town and disrupt everything.