You guys, I just noticed the 10^th anniversary^* of this blog has quietly come and gone and I did nothing to make note of it. What started as a simple task to keep family from freaking out while we traveled, burgeoned into an up-to-thrice weekly effort to build an audience platform that might make me more attractive to publishers, and then waxed and waned according to how funny (or pissed off, embarrassed, caustic, or inspired) I was feeling week by week has really atrophied as of late. And I feel terrible about that.

Someone asked me recently “are you even writing anymore?” as if it’s something like a tree falling in the forest: not really there unless someone is able to respond to it in some way.

In short, writing? Yes! Pushing pithy material out on this poor blog? Not so much.

Buckle in, I’mma going to catch you all up:

• We have two dogs now, which feels like a lot of dogs. We’ve been working on training the younger one so that he doesn’t always have to seem like more dog than he is, but that’s an uphill battle. He’s a lovely, expensive, muddy monster with selective hearing and he makes us laugh.
• We’ve downsized, which was something I somehow thought would make it less attractive for our now-adult children to live with us. The answer is no. I’m not sad about that. I love these guys, but holy cow does it feel crowded around here.
• About two years ago I decided to make a shift in profession, and it’s something I’ve completely bumbled. Long story short: in my desire to transition from consulting on a bunch of projects to leading one organization, I have mucked it all up and am now still consulting for a couple of groups, serving as interim head of another organization, and executive director (more or less full time) for a third. What this looks like from a functional standpoint is no fewer than seventeen email and social media accounts open on my laptop at any point and significant gaps in cognitive ability wherein I often can’t remember my own name.
• All this was while I was president of my Rotary club and among my greatest accomplishments is keeping a caterer in business who did not serve us a single meal.
• None of this stops me from feeling guilty about not running as much as I should. Even slowly. Remember when that was my thing? Now it’s an effort in which it feels like the universe is conspiring against me considering the crappy air quality and heat waves that have rolled through these parts since June.
• Meanwhile, we quietly celebrated thirty years of marriage recently with a family trip to Costa Rica that turned out to be inadvertently cathartic, with one kid electing to return home early––which was not a bad thing but a very healthy, proactive decision wherein I learned to let go of best-laid plans and said kid worked through some tough life decisions. And Mike was very brave through it all despite harboring the suspicion that the whole trip was all an elaborate, expensive ruse to kill him and make it look like an accident. And, not wholly unrelated, I’ve learned how to take great, close up photos of deathly poisonous but also stunning creatures with my iPhone in the middle of the pouring rain at night.

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• Not to mention the fact that we’re all quietly figuring out how to cope in the middle of a pandemic, in what has to be one of the most consistently weird times in human history, or at least during the course of my life. There should be plenty to blog about. To be honest with you, I’ve started and stopped about twenty dispatches in the last year and a half. But they’ve all fizzled. Sometimes I can’t find the energy to be pithy or funny about reality these days. Like everyone else I’m struggling in that department.

But I AM still writing! I have a project going that has my whole heart and that someday I hope to share with you. I’ll give you a teaser: it’s about a group of misfit young people figuring out their place in the cosmos while chasing down bad guys who have kidnapped someone very important to the functionality of the galaxy. It’s harrowing, irreverent, it plays quite loose with the laws of physics and quantum mechanics and probably math and other things I like to dabble in and gives me the google search history of someone much more intelligent and probably also criminal. I do hope one day to share it with you. The novel. Not the google search history. You’ll probably think I’m an even bigger dork than you do now.

But you probably also know I’m just a giver in that way.

This all ends up sounding very vague and I hate it when people do that. I mean, why put anything out there when you’re not going to tell the whole story?

One day soon, I promise to recap our adventures in Costa Rica and that trip to Mexico I wrote about but tabled for what I thought would be a couple of months because I felt bad about traveling on the eve of a pandemic. I’ll share with you why the 30^th may be the pearl anniversary for some people but it’s the essential oils celebration for us (which ends up sounding way sexier than it should); why we’re studying Portuguese these days; and how to mess up the whole process of becoming an empty nester in thirty-seven crazy steps.

I bet you can’t wait.

^* updated from an earlier version of this blog where I mistakenly thought 2011 was 20 years ago because apparently mathing is too hard for me today.