I know I have some obsessive compulsive traits, I think a lot of programmers do just as much as a lot of artists and writers. It lets us ignore most distractions and actually get things done. In many ways, it is the same thing that gets someone up an hour early to finish NaNoWriMo or ignore normally basic things like eating, drinking, or going the bathroom just to finish a chapter.

Needless to say, I have that trait. I can spend twelve hours working on a project, be it writing or programming. The animals are used to it. I joke that the house stops moving when Fluffy is out of town, and it is pretty much true. Sometimes, I think even the fish stopped swimming when we had them (left those in Illinois).

But, there is a drawback to all this: stopping.

Fluffy, like many spouses for people like me, have learned how to pry someone away from the computer. It can be a certain way of saying something or establishing ground rules. Fluffy has those and, well, I've grown to count on them. It also means that when she's out of town, I find myself keep on working, even as I'm saying "just three more minutes, then stop". Three hours later, I'm still saying it. I get up and start cleaning up DVD's or reprogramming the remotes so they work better. I just can't seem to stop easily.

It's taken me four hours to stop today. But, it was a wonderfully productive four hours (well, and the sixteen from yesterday and the eight from the day before).

• Working on the graphical style for Glorious Saber, talk about that tomorrow.
• Cleaned up much of the MfGames CIL library, including adding new features and removing most of the unpolished and cruft.
• Worked on the command-line tool library and got the basics up and running.
• Refactored the tool library so I can easily turn a tool into a MSBuild task. At the moment, it will just require a simple command-line tool to create a CodeDom layer to integrate everything.
• Cleaned up the bug tracking software for my libraries so I can keep track of tasks and things left to do.
• Wrote an automatic updating script for my short stories so I don't have to manually import things when I write them.
• Walked for two hours in the rain.
• Clean and did laundry, pretty sure I didn't dry any of Fluffy's clothes.
• Watched 12 movies since Friday.

And now, I need to stop. I'm going to obsess about a game and play that for the rest of the day, baring a walk with the dog or mowing of the grass.