Well, that pretty much wraps it up.

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2018


I kinda lost interest in this whole blogging thing.  Reasons include laziness, shifting priorities, and no longer feeling the need to fill the world with more word pollution.  It's not like I'm getting paid to spew more words out onto the internets.  I don't really care anymore to shout just to hear my own voice.

Anyways.  I can't say 2017 was a horrible year.  It was a very very weird year.  Just so weird.  One of my musical heroes died a shocking and terrible death, and it has broken my heart.  Do you know how often there's a song in my head, and it's Chris Cornell's voice?  Months later, I've been able to listen to him and it stings.  I am grateful to have recorded music though.  His musicianship lives on.  I miss him so much.  It hurts deeply to know that there will be nothing more.  It hurts me so horribly that he took his own life.  It will always hurt.  I never met the man, but this will always hurt.

One of my entertainment heroes continued to disappoint me deeply and seriously, if he was my friend I'd be staging an intervention.  The guy who throws hard things at his wife is not the victim, and I know his life has been rough, but he is not the object of pity.  He needs to clean himself up, get healthy, apologize, and stop believing his own hype.

 FINALLY the world started listening to what women have been whispering to each other forever: that we generally are mishandled and abused and mistreated by a lot of men who probably don't even have a clue about how much damage they are inflicting, and worse, do not care.

There is a mentally addled buffoon of a reality TV star ineptly running the country to the south of us. I do not understand how this cruel bullying ass-grabbing racist still has an approval rating of any kind.  I am baffled by what people will believe just simply by being told it's true.

I spent a whole summer with my leg in a cast.  I broke my ankle in three places.  You'd think this would be a horse related injury, but nope.  I friggin stepped crooked on the stairs in my own house and ended up with a metal plate, six screws, and a huge bolt in my ankle.

So I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about my mental health. Sometimes I did these two things at the same time.

My kids have become young adults.  Today we are packing two cars full of boxes in preparation for moving the young lady into a beautiful little apartment with her awesome boyfriend.  I have spent months preparing myself for this.  They just got the place with two weeks to pack, so it's been an accelerated acceptance process for her dad and I.  Is she ready?  Well heck, who is, ever?  Yeah, at 23 I was raising my first baby, as in, HER, but just because my uterus produced a child does not mean I was mature.  It was just what I did.  No regrets here.  But she is as ready as she'll ever be.  The world grows us up, and she won't grow up any faster if she stays living with us.  Meanwhile, the boy has been in his apartment for a year, but still gets his mail here, and there is no pressure to make any permanent decision.  They will still have bedrooms here and can stay over whenever they want or need to.  Best of all, the kids are five blocks away from each other.  We have to drive an hour to get there, but they are close together.

My dog is old, my horses are all teenaged, and I love them all so much, we are all a death-do-us-part situation.  I might start teaching lessons next year if I'm well enough, but I might go more in a therapy direction.  These horses have been such good therapy for me.  I love just being in the barn, even if I am too weak to work like I used to, even when I could only stand on one foot.

Soon it will be just me and my old feller in this house, mixing records and cooking for musicians.  Can you believe that?  If anybody had even suggested five years ago that I'd be cooking meals for people who were making music in my house, I'd laugh.  I am stunned that I like it this way.  I help my man's work go more smoothly, and I go to the barn every day to see my horses and do my chores.  It's okay.  We are still married.

Last year's mantra was FORGIVE YOURSELF and it couldn't have been a better fit for this weird year.

At this point, 2018 appears to be shaping up just as weirdly: We have no water because a pipe burst down the road, and minutes ago my husband was trying to tow a frozen five ton truck with our jetta.  Oddly enough, he managed to budge it two feet and if it weren't for all the snow he'd probably have it out of our driveway.  And there's a huge two truck on the other side of the bridge waiting for the frozen truck to get pulled over the bridge so he can pull it to the shop.  Seriously, our little road warrior fifteen year old Jetta was actually pulling the five ton cube truck.  We are friggin insane.

So I'm off.  We've got two VWs filled with my daughter's stuff, since we couldn't start the frozen truck.  I'm going to go help which will probably involve standing on the snowbank, shaking my head and wondering why in the heck we don't have a tractor, right?


Have a good one, folks.