Yesterday, I was listening to a news story on the 200,000 gallons a day of oil spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico, and tried to convert that into a number I could wrap my head around.

Long story short, it prompted my first post at Rough Equivalents in nearly two years. I won't make you all click over for the detailed explanation. 200,000 gallons of oil will create a millimeter-thick oil slick the size of approximately 170 football fields.

For more details on the math behind that and numbers on how deep the oil would be if it was limited to the area of a single football field, visit "Football Fields of Spilled Oil" over at Rough Equivalents.

Here are some more "not long enough to qualify for a blog post" facebook posts.

April 26:

I need those "Clockwork Orange" thingies to clamp my eyes open this morning.

April 28:

I won't blame Obama for everything Bush did. I'll just blame him for letting so much of it continue.

April 29:

Some signs I've created to spice up my office decor.

April 30:

Sieze the day, hold it hostage, and demand chocolate.

April 30:

Your job as a parent is not only to help your child learn to fly, but to terminate with extreme prejudice any motherfucker who would try to shoot that child down.

May 3:

One time, after my oldest son had chattered nonstop from the backseat for a while, I told him I "ran out of hearing." He'd talked so much, he used it all up. And if he wanted me to be able to hear him again, he was going to have to be quiet so I could build up a new reserve.

For the past few weeks, I've been getting up at 6, riding a bus to Bellevue, and spending my days trying to compile data and derive insights that will help make the search experience better on Bing. Really can't go deeper into it than that. But I like playing with data and trying to see what insights I can extract. Today I completed a spreadsheet on 498 city-related queries, imported it all into a database, and I had to tear myself away from running queries to make sure I didn't dip into overtime or miss my bus.

As has been my experience at Microsoft in the past, I have yet to meet anyone actually evil. I generally meet a lot of people who have a passion for making things even better and cooler and more useful... you know, geeks.

In the meantime, my boys keep growing up and surprising me. I still can't believe I'm the father of two boys. So many of my friends had a boy and a girl or just girls. I've got two boys, and they're gorgeous and smart, and I just have to make sure they grow up smart enough to pass for sane, but offbeat enough to come up with those left-field ideas that redefine how we think about time or gravity or art.

I've been trying to do some programming, but I like the idea of programming more than the act, so I've been doing a lot of planning and evaluating and tweaking my dev configuration. Hoping to lay some foundation code this weekend and get some coding momentum going.

Still want to write my story about the libero solstice... on the shortest night of the year, under a full moon, vampires become mortal. They may go to confession and be given last rites, then they may choose to watch the sun come up. And each year, each major religion in each major city has one poor holy man who volunteers or is volunteered for the task of ministering to the undead.

So much to do. So little time.

If you want signs that the economy is beginning to recover, I've been running into them this month.

First sign: I got a contract gig. Suffice it to say, it's been a while. But I am now employed through June with a possible extension through the end of the year.

Second sign: When my short story got published on Leite's Culinaria earlier in the month, I used it as an excuse to contact a number of recruiters and headhunters I've met over the past couple of years. One of them told me he'd made more in the first 45 days of this year than he did in the last 90 days of 2009. Seeing as he makes money from getting people jobs, that's encouraging.

Third sign: Tonight we went out to dinner to celebrate my first week of being employed again. Oddly enough, I recognized the woman sitting at the table next to us. She works at the Unemployment office. I mentioned to her that I'd started working again and she said that a lot of her clients were either getting back to work lately or were getting more interviews and good prospects. If someone who works at the Unemployment office says she's seeing the job market picking up, that's encouraging too.

Obviously, this isn't a scientific study or an official government statistic. It's just three points of anecdotal evidence. But it's three points that are making me feel better about the economy than I have in a long time.