Hey all, hope you are well and that everything is going just the way you want it to. I am first apologizing for my absence, I have no concrete excuse, nothing that there are words to describe for my not being here. In the past months I have popped into this site, checked a few blogs, smiled at what I read, then left without comment. Shame on me, but my mother always told me if I had nothing nice to say, better to say nothing at all. I chose to say nothing. Don't get me wrong, the few blogs I read were nice, made me smile, made me think, but I have not been in a nice place lately and didn't want to inflict that on anyone.

I was afraid if I started to comment, on anything, things would escape onto the page that had no business being there, no business being released into the world at large, no business being shared, or in this case dumped, on people I have come to know and consider friends. I have missed you, my TV.com friends. I have thought of you often, wondered about you, and hoped you have been well.

I have spent the last months doing some soul searching, trying to find a way to put things into perspective and to get a handle on myself. I somehow seem to have lost touch with me, the up beat, positive, happy me. It is alarming at my age to realize that a lot of what I thought I knew was not reality, but in fact a sugar coated facsimile of what is really happening around me. The decline began with the death of my friend at the hands of her husband, which I wrote a blog about, but that was just the tip of the ice burg. I found myself drawing deep inside and turning my back on those things and those people I used to reach out to for guidance and a sympathetic ear.

Over the past few months I have tried again and again to post a new blog, to be open and forthwith about what was going on with me, but the ability to write a decent blog eluded me and the end result was always the same, like reading what would appear on the page if you opened up a vein and let all the poison inside spill out and form the words. Not pretty, not up beat, but dead depressing and rather hopeless and sad. I have been searching for something, I know not what, but the search continues. I know what I want, and that is quite simple, I want to put the blinders back on and pretend that all the bad in this world no longer exists, but that is as impossible as deciding not to breathe.

This morning I walked out the door to hear birds singing, for the first time since winter began and it was a hopeful sound, a sound I missed and it lightened my heart. I hope the birds will still be singing tomorrow and the day after and that spring will bring with it a new beginning, a new hopefulness, and a new feeling of wellbeing.

I have missed you all and am glad to be back. I hope you will forgive my absence.

Later....