All Apologies

Oh, ever faithful readers (if there are, in fact, any of you left), I have been remiss in my bloggerly duties for far too long. It first started as just a few days during which I didn't have time to write, then grew into weeks and finally into hulking, guilt-inducing months of silence that intimidated me into ever further silence. But a wake-up call from a good friend and secretly-faithful reader reminded me that I have stories to tell that need to be told and should be read and here I am again to share them with you. My most sincere apologies for the disappearing act, I promise never to leave you so in-the-lurch without announcement again. The largest problem that I now face is how in the hell I can catch you all up on the events of the past months. It may be hurried or it may turn into a rambling, incoherent jumble of sentences but somehow, someway I will eventually manage to bring us all up to speed with current events.

Let's start somewhere around where we left off. I had returned from the all-too-brief wedding weekend with Prince Charming to slog through my final two weeks in Baltimore. And slog through I did, finally managing to pack up all of my earthly belongings into two suitcases and a huge box for shipping, boarding a poorly-booked flight home to Montana and landing back on my home turf late Saturday night, July 28. I spent the following days sleeping off my traveling exhaustion, hanging with my folks and doing nothing more than wishing that Prince Charming was already there, in Bozeman, with me. Being with my family again made me acutely aware that I really wanted PC to be with my family, a part of my family, my own chosen family.

There is no way that I can detail the entire ten, blissful days of togetherness. It would be too exhaustive, too repetitive and too difficult to dredge from my memory at this point. But suffice to say that we did everything we could possibly do and we had an amazing time. We did the Sweet Pea Festival with my family and with Red, who was also visiting. We floated the Madison River (basically you sit in an inner tube on a river, drink some beer and float on down it - if I've never described that before), spent a few days at my cabin, met endless numbers of friends and family and got really, really used to being together. Not to say that everything was 100% perfect - there were little bumps (caused mostly by my moods or poor stress-handling skills), but we navigated them fairly easily - especially considering that the anniversary we celebrated (with mimosas in the mountains) was only our four month.

Throughout most of our time in Montana, the future of the geography of our relationship was still in question. I had yet to hear word on any suitable jobs, and I was beginning to despair that I had been too narrow in my demands. But I had decided fairly early on that I needed to be back in California once I was done in Baltimore - not just to be near Prince Charming because I hated being so far away, but also to see if our relationship would weather being together as well as it had weathered being apart. It was the Friday before PC left that I finally heard on a job that sounded good and I accepted. Then I prepared to leave that following Thursday for my new place of residence and employment: San Francisco.

Lyrics of the Day

"Now are you gonna love me? Are you gonna fight for me? Promise that you'll never, ever leave me please." Aaron Espe Settling