Caterwauling

As I drove home from work tonight, I composed my “Farewell” letter that I wanted to post here. To thank you for reading Caterwauling for the decade-plus it’s been around. For reading my beloved Maddie’s page for as long as she was in our lives. For being a part of, and not just an innocent bystander along, my life’s journey.

I wanted to tell you that things are different now … I’M different now. I’ve lost a lot of my snark along the way. I rarely say anything salacious anymore. Hell, I can’t tell you the last time I had an, ahem, overnight relationship. Seriously, I’m not the girl you met here, however many years ago when you first landed on this page.

And yet, as I sit here looking at the tangled web of code that some hacker left … I am suddenly ready to pay my friends who unfucked-up this page the last time it got hacked, to unfuck it up again.

I got scared that someone very important to me found this page. I mean, I don’t plan to hide anything from my past. But it’s too soon for him to know SO MUCH of it. Sure I’ve kept a lot offline, but I’ve never been shy about sharing everything in my heart and mind — even if I wasn’t so proud of it.

A part of me wants to use this space to chronicle my life now — and the emotions I can assure you I’ve never felt, along with a WHOLE NEW WORLD of fears and, yes, joys that I never knew existed. Maybe someday. But I know that the happy-happy-joy-joy of today is as fragile as the eggs now being left by nesting sea turtles along carefully preserved areas of our Florida beaches. And I don’t want this blog to ruin yet another job, relationship or anything else that means — or could come to mean — the world to me.

I do miss hearing from all of you. Hit me up on Facebook — that’s where I spend my free time. And I’m thinking of starting a new blog — a professional one — at one of the other domains I own. It’s time I wrote that book that everyone’s asking me about. It’s also time to study for an exam that I don’t need to take but would behoove me to prepare for, to help me in my life’s work. It’s also time to think about a master’s degree or some other certificate program that will get me excited about my career again and, maybe, back to making that great salary I gave up in favor of sanity preservation, not so long ago.

Whatever I end up doing, I’ve got to do SOMETHING. I’ve been tightly guarding my heart, my thoughts, my “everything that makes me, me” for far too long. Yes, I’ve changed a lot — I’ve grown up, finally — but I’ve got a long way to go toward having my shit together. But what I did or didn’t do with my past is of no consequence anymore.

I’ve become the person I’m meant to be. And it’s time to love and honor her. How best to do that, I have no idea. But you’ll know it as soon as I do!

So, OK, I’ve been a WEE bit busy of late. And lo and behold, apparently this silly page got hacked again. Is it a sign to finally give up after 10-plus years of blogging here?

I need to blather here, so bear with me. Not that anybody should still be reading. But still. It’s my diary and I want to have this memory. 🙂

I could ramble about the car. Like, it catching FIRE on 95-North and again on 95-South as I came home. I could bitch about the idiot mechanics keeping it an extra few days to unfuckup their work, only to break something else in the process AND try to sell me new tires. But alas, they fixed it … aaaand the engine light came on the first day I had my car back.

(O HAI crack in the emissions system! *headdesk*)

I could ramble about work. Which is perfectly lovely right now. I’m in a research phase and it’s boring as all get-out. I’m hoping things get a lil’ busier. Which, God likes to grant THAT wish, so I’m not worried.

I could also say that I got dumped on Valentine’s Day … but in kind of a good way. I dumped a guy many years ago on Valentine’s Day and I haven’t had a good one since then. So I’m hoping that getting dumped — by my final freelance client — on Valentine’s Day is exactly what I needed.

Lord knows I am enjoying the extra relaxing and TV-watching I’m doing. 🙂 And they paid me right away, unlike VaJayJay, VaGina and TwunTina, so hallelujah.

Anyway, I’m also getting up and to work earlier so that I can enjoy the silence before the boys come in for the day. So when I collapse at night, I still feel like I’ve earned the mental vacation every evening.

But what I really want to ramble about? Is that I just had the BEST. FIRST. DATE. EVER. I’m keepin’ the good stuff to myself, of course. But … wow.

I’m making no predictions. No summaries. No wish lists. No ANYTHING that would jinx this.

But I will say this. All these vehicular adventures that are taking years off of my life and could possibly even kill me? (See — Fire: Electrical, at high speeds during a 40-mile-each-way-commute.) Hunh-uh. No way.

Life is just getting good. I plan to stick around for it. For a LONG time.