So, Here's What Happened...

No, as anyone who is on Twitter knows, I did not drop dead several months ago. I was, however, unable to access my blog or anything other than what I could do on my mobile. What happened was a series of problems. First, and the one period of my absence for which I am responsible, after a period of growing frustration I decided to take some time off to cool down. I had growing concerns about what I was doing, which increasingly seemed ineffective or totally counter to what I was trying to do based on the feedback that I was getting. During that time I never came to any final decision about what I was going to do but, whatever had happened, I certainly planned to inform everyone. However, that was not possible due to a very frightening family problem.

One morning my mother's heart stopped and she took a very nasty fall, hitting her face on something quite hard. Her heart did start again, on its own, but she could not get up and no one was around to help her. She had to stay there on the floor until my father got home who immediately came and got me to help get her off the floor and into a chair. After persuading her to go the hospital to get checked out we learned that my mother has a very serious heart condition and that if such an episode happened again we would almost certainly lose her. This was, as you can imagine, a very difficult period to get through and we have yet to obtain any real resolution. Once that happened, everything else had to take second place as our family pulled together to help mom who was, and remains, able to do very little for herself. We still don't know exactly what can be done, medically, for her. It took a very long time to get her any treatment at all as this happened at a time (Thanksgiving to Christmas) when many doctors were on vacation.

Once I had the time to even think about updating here, another problem arose which was that my internet connection failed. I called the provider (the local telephone co-op) and got service restored but before I could turn around it had gone out again and efforts to resolve that situation became very frustrating, very fast. Finally, I decided to give up on the old service and give a satellite internet provider a try which took time to set up, schedule, install and all of that. Once that was done, I had service in the library but not my office and I had to order a booster to get signal where I needed it and finally had to have my computer-tech sister get that set up and working, which ended up taking a while itself because she was not able to get it to work and had to go ask some other experts and come down the following week before everything was finally up and running. That was yesterday (or the day before yesterday by the time this goes up probably). So, that is my explanation for my long absence.

Now, as I mentioned, not everything has been resolved and things cannot just go back to business as usual. I now have much more demands on my time than I did before and would not be able to post as often as I had been even if I wanted to. There may not even be a reason to as I may no longer have any readers (it would certainly be understandable). So, all I can say for right now is that I have not gone anywhere, I will probably be posting in the future but it will necessarily be much more infrequent than before. I do still feel as though I should work out the dilemma that caused my original absence which I have yet to do. So, that is all for now and for anyone who is still checking in and reads this, I thank you for your patience and especially thank those who did not choose to think the worse of me for my absence.
Until next time,
stay "mad" my friends.
       -MM