I'm back... and armed with something gross.

Have no fear, the elusive blogger is here! And alive! Though... a bit blurry.

I appreciate the emails I received from some of my loyal readers inquiring as to whether I had drifted away into oblivion, or perhaps I had won the lottery and ran away to live in a hut made of stucco and beer somewhere along the shores of Mexico, or maybe I was bundled up in the corner rocking back and forth while grasping at my ankles.

Well, none of the above. Pretty boring, really. I know. Time just seems to be..... slipping away faster than I can grab it and hang on to it.

And who [or what] is the elusive one here? Perhaps I am, but time is the bigger perpetrator, I say.

And now that I am actually posting something.... I have to leave again! I'm heading out for a few days to the other side of the country. I leave tomorrow. But... rest assured... upon my return, I will have fabulous things to report to you all. And if I do not, I will SURELY fabricate wicked awesome stories and create pictures of these 'supposed' events in my photo program by super imposing myself onto a picture of me arm and arm with a celebrity or something. I might not even have to do that. Because... I might just already have said photo saved on my desktop.... me and a certain Mr. Depp at a movie premier from a couple of years back.

However, I will leave you with a little story to get you through. Of course, you have survived the last month without a blog entry from me... I imagine you'll get by these next few days. But, just in case you need something from me.... here you go:


Picture This:

My mother and her husband are driving along one day. It's daylight. Things are clear. Lovely. Vivid.

There is a smooshed brown bag on the side of the road. They see it as they zip past it.

husband "Hey! Did you see that bag?"
my mom, "Yes."
husband, "We should go see what's in it!"
my mom, "That's okay."
husband, "but it could be money! A bag of money!"
my mom, "That someone just tossed out of the window?"
husband, "Well, you never know."
my mom, "it might be a body part."
husband, "Cool!"


My mom's husband turns the car around somewhere in the midst of this conversation and goes back to the bag and slowly the car comes to a halt, with the bag just a few feet away. Visions of being able to roll around on a bed of money start to fly around within his imagination.

There was excitment in the air! Well, in the air that surrounded my mother's husband. My mother was very hesitant, understandably so, to play along.

He grabs the bag, which is crumpled, but nicely folded at the top.... obviously to seal in the goods.

Nobody is around. Thankfully, my mother is probably thinking to herself.

He puts the brown paper bag in the back seat and drives on. A couple of miles or so up the road, it is time to check out its contents. He has already begun to think of all the ways he can spend the money he is about to uncover! My mother continues to knit in the front seat. She really doesn't care much about this mysterious bag o' who-knows-what that lies on the backseat.

He pulls the car off to the side of the road, as my mother has refused to grab the bag and open it up herself, so she has passed the exciting treat of opening up the bag over to her husband.


My mother side glances his way.... for she has become just slighly curious. Though, probably more for what he will do when he realizes that there is not money in that bag. She surely believes that there is not freedom within the folds of that paper bag.... nor is there a pile of diamonds, rubies, or sapphires.

As he carefully unfolds the tops of the bag... his facial expression shifts from curiosity and excitment to something a little more horrific.

There is vomit in the bag.

Vomit.

Someone else's vomit that is now in the front seat of my mother's car... thankfully, still contained in the bag, at least. He threw the bag out of the window.... just as it had been thrown, most likely, sometime earlier that day.

No diamonds...no rubies... no money... no gold inside that bag... but rather just a story to tell. A story with a moral attached to it. That moral, of course, being... don't be picking up bags along the side of the road and expect to find much more than vomit. And that would be lucky, really. At least there really wasn't a body part in it.

I mean, can you imagine? GROSS!