Take two.

This is me, attempting a return to blogging. I've taken the last seven months off*, but I find I keep re-composing blog postings in my head. Maybe it's seeing Mount St. Helens in the distance and the sort of giggly feeling it still gives me on those rare hyper-clear days, even after almost four years in Portland. Maybe it's the start of summer vacation. Maybe it's a fight on an airplane, the upstairs of our house, my dog, the newspaper. Maybe it's the weird weightless conversation I had with an ex-boyfriend and his insane wife (coincidentally, my ex-roommate). I want to write about it, start to think about the words I'd use, and then I remember, oh, yeah, I don't have that blog anymore. Maybe I needed to miss it in order to try again.

So here I am, back again. ("Shady's back... tell a friend...") And I thought, I really want to write about last night... but I don't have a... well, hell, all I can do is start a new blog.

I had a great night last night with Em and Dan, sitting on the front porch, drinking a shade too much wine (who doesn't have to work tomorrow??? ME, that's who!), smoking a cigarette or two, talking about the origin of the phrase "I'm Marc-hungry" and telling stories about ex-boyfriends and insane-o wives (a WAY involved story for another day) and in general having the kind of night that you always want but don't always get. The weather was breezy but the right temperature for sitting outside as long as you had a jacket on, the wine was of the cheap-but-good variety (and totally held up our Screw Top Theory), I upheld my reputation as The Baby Whisperer with the little man babbled himself to sleep in five minutes after I put him down... in short, a perfect night.

Right now it's 12:30 on a Thursday and I should motivate--I really really should motivate to do something, but it's my first REAL day of vacation and I'm thinking that I might actually be okay with getting nothing on my to-do list done today. I read a great book ("The History of Love"), I made an omelette for breakfast, and I think I may read the paper and then take a nap in front of the TV. That sounds like a much better to-do list than Mow Lawn, Organize Pictures and Clean Dining Room, which was my to-do list.

Ah hell, summer vacation is two-plus months long, and I deserve it, at least for today. House Hunters, Law and Order, and maybe even Battlestar Galactica, you've been warned. I will find you. Soon. Once I motivate to the TV.

Welcome back, me. I'll see how this goes.

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*I've started a couple blogs and then--I dunno. I stopped my big one in November when a whole bunch of crap made me want to roll into a ball like a cartoon hedge hog. You'd think that'd be when a blog would come into the most use, venting and exhuming and purifying. You'd be wrong. Some things are so sticky, so drown-inducing, that just typing them into a box on a screen drags you under. And the pseudo-eternity of blog posts means that those potholes are just there, waiting to suck you in again. Somehow the infamy of complaining about my dog, my students, my non-weightloss doesn't bother me, but something really personal--when it really matters--does. I tried starting one in May that was about some hardcore stuff I was going through, but I wasn't really comfortable with that. Then I started another one a little later, but I forgot and dropped off. Now? Maybe I'll forget again. Or. Maybe I won't.