Imlebideli

I realize that it’s been two months since my last entry. Not quite an auspicious beginning, five entries then prolonged hiatus.

I didn’t plan it that way. Really.

However, I must admit that I was ready to ditch the whole online journal idea, except that my daughter Dreama got me all involved in this online journal community thing, even to the extent of getting me hooked into JournalCon as one of the hosts. I don’t mind, I find it all kind of fun, but it necessitated that I continue as a journaller.

So I’ve been writing, but only a little, and not every day, because I’ve been ridiculously busy. Work — my primary job, not the secondary one — has been outrageous, as I’m in the middle of working on the rollout of a new computer system. Right now, instead of dealing with taxation and finance issues, I’m spending every day doing system testing, writing scripts and “playing geek” and it is really quite draining.

With my eyesight such that it is (I realize that I have yet to tell that story, it is coming soon.) and the unusual number of hours that I’m spending in front of a computer at work, the idea of spending more time at the monitor when I get home is just too distressing for words to express. And I’m a slow typist. It takes me quite a long time to write my short little entries.

On top of that, my sister Cynthia died. It was unexpected and absolutely crushing. She was a multiple pack a day smoker, and I always told her that the cigarettes would kill her. I just never thought it would be so soon. She went into the hospital at the beginning of the month, thinking that she had pneumonia or something. When the diagnosis was finally given, she didn’t call anyone, because she didn’t want us to come to see her before she had a chance to get home and clean up her apartment. She thought that she’d have some time, that she would be treated, that she’d get better. When I arrived, with my eldest sister Linda (there were three of us, I’m the youngest) on Friday the 13th (ominous, huh?) we were given a prognosis of a few months. On Saturday the 14th, that was revised to a few weeks. On Sunday, the 15th, my sister told everyone that she loved them, and stopped breathing.

I spent another week in Texas, where Cynthia lived, as Linda and I worked to clean out her apartment, dispose of her belongings, sell her car and all of those other things, and have a poorly planned, ridiculously expensive memorial service for her.

During that time, I wrote scores about what I was going through, but right now, all of that emotion is too raw to be revisited so that I can transcribe those entries to these pages. Dreama has offered to do it for me, and I will probably take her up on that, but as you may know, she’s on a happy hiatus these days too. (For another reason that keeping up here has not been high on my priority list.)

So that’s the long form answer to the question “Where have you been?” I wish I had an answer as to when I’ll be back. I think it will be soon. The computer rollout is coming to an end. My personal schedule is going through a great deal of realignment, which will also free up time for me to write. And I’m learning more about HTML so that doing different things here won’t be nearly as difficult. I freely admit that I didn’t do the HTML work on the design of this journal — I sketched how I wanted it to look and handed it off to the designer in the family to implement. But I’m to a point where I’ve learned enough that I can make changes if I want to, and that makes me feel much more inclined to start doing something here.

So, the best thing that I can say is soon. Those of you who have asked to be on my notify list will be the first to know.

Thanks for stopping by.