The Return of the Prodigal Blogger

As Jim Kerr and Simple Minds sang, I’m alive and kicking!

Did you know that Jim Kerr was married to Chrissie Hynde? True story.

Anyway, I took a little hiatus, mainly due to being really busy around the holidays. It seems like we had a lot of stuff going on, going to Notre Dame games and family outings. It was a busy but fun couple of months. Our super cool niece Jennifer was visiting from San Diego, and we did quite a few things with her; we had family get-togethers for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve; I made contact with one of my favorite musicians, Bob Walkenhorst, and we bought a painting from him; our online friends (now real life friends!) Winston and Jen came to visit and we took them to see Cornerstone Blues Band; we spent a weekend in Cleveland and visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and saw their amazing Rolling Stones special exhibit; we dealt with a bona fide blizzard and the ominous-sounding Polar Vortex, which was about as pleasant as it sounds!

With all of this stuff going on, I felt the need to hunker down and withdraw a bit in my downtime. You know how us introverts are...we need to recharge after social activities. I am resolved to be more diligent in my reading, and I will do better with posting book reviews here. I am also getting more immersed in music, and will post reviews of songs and albums, too. I even took a hiatus from politics, and am slowly working my way back into my usual political involvement (it’s easy to take a break when you’re so disgusted by their ridiculous behavior that you want to smack a bunch of them upside the head). I want to work on writing other projects besides this blog, and am trying to wrap my brain around that and figure out exactly how to go about it. I bought a ¾-sized Fender Strat and want to work on learning how to play (a full-sized one is too big for my hands). I would like to get back into playing piano.

Coming up in just a little over a month, we have the cruise with Ken’s Mom to the Southern Caribbean, and I’ll need to start laying things out for that soon. In May, we are planning on a house concert by the aforementioned Bob Walkenhorst at Shane and Matt’s house, and that is going to be an amazing opportunity to meet and listen to one of my all-time favorites! (More about that soon!) Ken will be spending some time in Indianapolis in April, and I may spend a few days down there with him (firefighter’s convention…!), then we’ll do our usual Florida trip in July, and we want to plan a big family and friends get-together in Vegas in October for Oktoberfest at the Munich Hofbräuhaus replica there. So it seems that I’ll get a breather here and there, but there will be things to plan throughout much of the coming year.

My mind is just spinning with things I want and need to do! This is not a complaint. I’m having a lot of fun, but it’s easy to reach a point of sensory overload. Thus the blog hiatus. Something eventually has to give, and this time it was the blog. I’ve found that if you start feeling pressure to write, and that you feel you have to make an entry, or feel guilty when you don’t, it’s time to step away for a bit. Once it feels like a duty, it’s just not fun anymore, know what I mean? So I stepped away for a bit. When I started thinking, “Hey, I’d like to do a blog entry soon...I miss it,” I knew it was time to come back. I can tell you that it feels good, and I’m smiling as I type this.

So I’m back, you little maniacs! You can’t get rid of me that easily!