Back in the Saddle Again

January 5, 2017

Hey, whoa! It’s me! Writing a blog post! This is kind of surprising, because things got weird there for a while and I disappeared.

Kind of like this! …Kind of.

Things That Got Weird

• I changed jobs a bunch of times. So many times that sometimes I just make something up so that I don’t have to talk about it, which is why a few people are under the impression that I’m an astronaut with the Israeli Space Agency.
• A death in the family. It was and continues to be the worst. I give it 0 out of 10, would not recommend.
• A car crash that totaled my car on the way home from the funeral. Have your airbags ever deployed? Here’s a helpful heads up — they smoke. It’s not the car that’s on fire. Quit panicking, you look ridiculous.
• An engagement. It is and continues to be the best! I give it 10 out of 10, would recommend. (Although I would also advise that there seems to be more to wedding planning than buying a dress and then wandering into a beautiful room where there is cake, which is sort of what I’d envisioned. Also I guess I have to learn Pinterest now?)
• I had a lot of episodes of “Murder She Wrote” to catch up on.

I was worried I’d never see you guys again. I was worried I’d never not see you again, actually, because this is a blog. You can’t see the faces I make while I’m writing it, and I can’t see the faces you make while you’re reading it, and I think this is for the best.

This is the face I make the entire time I’m writing. My mouth gets very dry.

For a while, I was sort of ok with never not seeing you again. You should know that it wasn’t you—it was me! I was sad, of course, but I thought it might be alright if we went our separate ways. We’d go back to being a bunch of people who have never seen each other, which is not at all different from who we are now, except that you wouldn’t have to look at as many pictures of my cats.

“It’s the end of an era,” I thought sadly, as I watched Jessica Fletcher rescue one of her 300 20-something nephews from jail, where he’d been wrongfully imprisoned for murder. Then I got distracted by Mrs. Fletcher’s cardigan and moved on.

Cabot Cove: The murder capital of the world, the fashion capital of my heart.

But when I woke up on January 1, something had changed. There was an empty hole inside my soul where this blog had been. There were a million other things I was burning to do, too, and it was a brand-new year! So help me, I am going to do them all! I am a phoenix, soaring out of the ashes of 2016—the stupidest year in the history of time—and into the brilliant light of 2017. Also, they took “Murder She Wrote” off Netflix, so I have more free time.

This is it! This is the year everything lines up for old Stephanie Summar.

Among other things…

• It’s the year I get back to blogging regularly!
• It’s the year I run 365 miles in 365 days, inspired by my friend Jeff (even though I already hate it and it’s making my entire body sore, including my hair and teeth)!
• It’s the year in which I drink no soda!
• It’s the year I finally figure out how to spell “occurred” and “sheriff” right on the first try! (Nope, didn’t get it that time. Thanks, spell check!)
• It’s the year in which I return phone calls. Even the ones from strangers.

Believe me, I could go on. I’ve made 10,000 New Year’s resolutions, and I’m going to accomplish every single one of them through the use of a hyper-organized Google calendar, numerous color-coded Post-It notes and the kind of willpower guaranteed to frighten my loved ones away forever.

I don’t know what your face looks like or what your New Year’s resolutions are, but I bet both of them are awesome. Who knows what 2017 will bring? All I know is that if you thought you were done looking at pictures of Winston and Ike, you thought wrong.

I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.

Written by Listful Thinking Posted in Blogging, Stop Talking About Your Cat, The World Is a Terrifying Place Tagged with blogging, Cats, goals, murder she wrote, New Year's Resolutions