It's been a while...

Hi everyone;

I don't know why the mood is striking now, but I am sitting in Starbucks recovering from two weeks at home with the kids, the holidays and more and the thought struck me that I should be writing down a few things....

Like when I started this blog originally, Facebook doesn't seem to be the place to share this much, so for those of you who are still subscribed in some way, or just the blogiverse in general, I am adding a potential overshare warning here since it's been quite some time since I typed out a blog post...

The first thing I guess I should do is apologize ... like many others before me, my blog just up and stopped one day with little rhyme, reason or warning... it wasn't that any major catastrophe happened, it actually crept up slowly - going from posting multiple times a day, down to once a day, then slowing to a few times a week... and finally one day I didn't open the laptop to write anything - and it stayed closed for a week... then two ... and life took over and I only felt small twinges of regret at missed opportunities and lost friendships when my blogging friends posted new and wonderful things about where their blogs were going...

May and June were incredibly busy months - Wayne was gone for several weeks to China - first with his MBA students and then with a group of undergrads he met up with and toured around all over - that left me single-parenting until we headed for our annual pilgrimage to Canada... but now that I write, I think my love of blogging died before that... when one of my heroes, my grandmother passed away in January of last year.

She was the one who always told me I should be a writer... and when she wasn't there to read and encourage me anymore, some of the light went out of blogging... sure, I kept going for a while, but it was mostly book reviews and shared content - it was as if my personal voice was silenced...

I threw my energy into organizing a tea party in her honor, and hugging my family more... and writing slipped further and further into the background...

Other things have filled some of the void- I started selling Pampered Chef,  and Wayne and I are trying to find more date nights (and date lunches), the kids are busier than ever too... but I'll save some of that for future posts...

because slowly, surely, as the anniversary of her death approaches I am finding that my fingers are itching to share and whether anyone else is out there reading, I know that she'll find a way to see every word.

H.