All Used Up...Back in Five Months...

I suppose that should have been the title had I bothered to write a temporary farewell back in mid-July when I ceased being much of a presence on Gather and other areas of the Net, like my blog at LiveJournal. Clinically speaking, it was a bout of depression which knocked the wind out of my sails, and with that I ceased to be able to concentrate, remember things I had viewed or read, and remained achingly unable to write creatively for months on end. What little writing I did was reduced to cryptic passages penned in my trusty Moleskine, and if you had been told that it was written by a thirteen year old in the throes of adolescent angst, you'd have said, "Tell me something I don't know!"

My recovery was due to a number of things, and while I'm loathe to admit to "better living through chemistry," it was adding a different drug to my antidepressant cocktail that seemed to make all the difference in my world. Three weeks later I was back on track, writing in my journal, tossing around attempts at poems, and ready to take on the "house cancer," which had grown considerably in my "absence." By the time husband, Chris, took me on a trip to Fort Worth, Texas to see the Hatshepsut exhibit at the Kimbell Museum, I was ready and raring to learn, experience, and consume with passion all the beauties the world had to offer. That trip at the end of November was the first travel we'd undertaken in nearly a decade which didn't have anything to do with evacuation for a hurricane. Granted, we managed to visit some interesting places on our "evacuation vacations," but it's somewhat difficult to enjoy travel when visions of sustained 130 mph winds lashing into one's hearth and home for nine to twelve hours keep pushing themselves to the front of the queue.