Well, after thinking that a stretch of 3 months between updates was the longest there would ever be here on The Bowser Shrine, it has now been nearly 9 months since my last update. Feel free to totally not believe anything I say anymore. I will stop making promises that I am unsure if I could keep. As I've stated before, I really hate to make excuses, or talk about any offline stuff unrelated to The Bowser Shrine. However, after such a long stretch of people seeing nothing happening here at all, it is about time everyone hears from me to avoid the impression that the site is dead.

2009 has been a very busy year for me. This is the first time I have worked a full-time job for more than one year. It isn't like grade school or college where you get a long summer break between years/semesters. I really do miss those. In the work world, you get about 3 weeks vacation to use in a year, instead of the 2-4 months one is used to from school/college summer holidays. I've already almost depleted my accrued holiday time for 2009 on two great trips this summer. Last month, I took a trip to Las Vegas with about 10 other friends for a bachelor party for about 4 days, which was totally awesome. And yesterday, I just came back from an amazing 2 week vacation to London, England, and I also got to visit Paris for a day during that time. It's been an expensive summer for me for sure, but I really felt that I've needed it.

I've been pretty serious about my career this year, but that has come with the cost of a good deal of my free time and online life. As I once stated in an earlier update, 90% of what you see on The Bowser Shrine was created while I was inbetween jobs for a few months. All I've managed to do since then it seems was maintain a few simple media updates. It takes a long, concentrated effort from me to construct the subpages exactly as I envision them. Another thing which perhaps is holding me back is that I have the tendency to be a perfectionist with a lot of things. This means that I don't feel comfortable working on something I really care about unless I feel like I can do the perfect job (e.g. ensuring I am completely engaged and in the mood, have had plenty of sleep, etc). This causes a tendency of procrastination if those certain requirements aren't met. Basically, I'll admit that there were some times when I could have definitely worked on The Bowser Shrine in some instances over this past stretch, but was either too tired from the work week before, or not feeling engaged enough. I often wish I didn't work this way, although in the past it has produced some pretty incredible results which I may share later. This kind of inconsistency can be very frustrating.

This site is by no means dead, and I do apologize for the inactivity and lack of updates. I'm sure you're sick of hearing me apologize and make excuses, and just want results. I can definitely understand that, but I just really want to make sure that I maintain the same degree of quality I have kept so far. I am still totally obsessed with Bowser, and will make sure I finish building my shrine for him. Believe me when I say that the guilt of going so long without any update at all has been eating me away from the inside. It is quite hard for me to believe that nearly 9 months passed by so quickly. It honestly just felt like only a couple of months. I'm not sure where the time goes for me anymore

I have noticed that my unique hit counter has spun to over 200,000 visitors now. That is extremely impressive, and it was only one year ago where it had just passed the 100,000 mark. It seems like word-of-mouth might be getting around, and I hope that the visitors that do come are satisfied with what I have so far. I still have so much more planned though (e.g. the gray links), I just wish I had the free time to do it!

As for when you're finally going to see an actual update on The Bowser Shrine for 2009, I can't make any promise. I will try to maybe get one in for this month of August, but unfortunately I have a large list of things to do which are probably higher-priority, and I pretty much only have weekends to do a lot of this stuff. It just seems like it never ends when it comes important real life stuff that I need to get done! When that update finally does come, I will definitely try to make up for that ridiculously long stretch, and maybe even make it worthwhile somehow. I just hope that update can be delivered sooner rather than later.

Take care now!