Yep, I'm Still Here...

I just realized how long it's been since I posted an update. "No problem," I thought, "I've got the next update almost done as a draft..."

And then I realized that the "almost done" draft is well over 600 words long (247 in the introductory paragraph alone) and I'd barely reached my intended halfway point.

Needless to say, I will be doing some serious rewriting.

On a more serious note, I've been off the air even more than usual because life's been more than a little complicated lately. Mom got sick so I got more involved in the Pipsqueak's daily routine (after-school care pickups & evening dance classes). Then I got sick and spent a couple of weeks too miserable to do much. (Daily routine: Wake up coughing. Stuff lungs back down my throat, then blow nose 8-9 times to restart breathing. Take meds & walk down the stairs. Sit down a few minutes to recover. Try hacking my lungs up my throat again. Make hot tea. Sit down a few minutes... You get the idea.) Mom still has her cough on & off and I just began to venture outside this week, so stamina's a bit of a  problem at the moment. (We also missed the Lindsey Stirling concert I was looking forward to; it would've been a nice surprise for Miri, but she never found out about it. Unfortunately, I ended up "eating" the cost of the tickets because I wasn't sick enough for the "guaranteed sickness refund" as defined in the policy.)

Even worse, someone somewhere seems to have turned the insanity dial up to 11 or maybe even 12; the past two months (plus) have been marked by a series of mini-crises that turn everything on its head without warning. For example, as I'm typing this I'm waiting for a phone call telling me what the evening's new plans are, since the old plans went out the window this morning when a good friend had to go into the hospital for emergency surgery and AJ suddenly inherited two more kids. (It's not an imposition, it's being done willingly -- but it's one more sudden remix of plans and schedules we hadn't counted on.)

So... anyway, sorry for the doom & gloom but I wanted to show that I'm not trying to ignore y'all -- really, I'm not! Life's just kinda gotten in the way (along with my writing multi-volume tomes instead of blog posts as part of "catching up").

I'll have much more succinct catch-up posts here early this coming week and, with luck, at least semi-regularly for the rest of the year.

Hope all's well at your end of the wire... and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!