time flies

all right, so i blew off the entire month of october. i'm sorry. i got caught up in some other stuff.

for a couple of days i was kind of weirded out by the effect you get when people with whom you are not actually that intimate kind of assume that level of friendship from reading your blog. and to a lesser degree, when you are standing there having a conversation with a live person and you KNOW you didn't tell them that one thing, but they pick up the conversation there anyway.

i knew what i was getting into when i started writing all this; it's a brand of performance art. i used to work as a storyteller. for a while i told children's stories, but then i started telling true stories. reaction was mixed. it was harder to get gigs, but the audiences had a stronger bond to the material.

so that probably only put me off for a few days.

and there was this thing about work; it takes a LOT of energy to be back doing the job i love. i have either been working at this job or preparing to work at it since about 1976, so it's kind of important to me.

and a lot has been happening there, a lot worth writing about, but due to the nature of the job, there's very little i can tell you about.

there was one thing, which is pretty much in the realm of public knowledge and old news to boot by this time:

one of our boys died last monday.

he had been in a car wreck sunday night and they kept him alive through about half the morning on monday. harvested a lot of organs, so maybe, just MAYBE some good can come out of this stupid, stupid horrible senseless thing.

one thing that maybe you should know about me is that i'm not anybody's mother, nor am i likely to be. so these children, the ones i work with, are my own precious children. they take that level of importance in my heart. and it just about kills me every time we have to bury one of them.

last fall a boy looked over at me and asked "if i died, would you cry?"

yes, i would.

a lot.

i don't know exactly why he asked; sometimes kids are just trying to put things in perspective, trying to understand.

everybody just wear your freakin' seatbelts, ok?


and besides all that, i'm pretty famous in the geocaching world for my complete failure to be up-to-date on my geocache logs. basically it's a lot like this, except the narration is broken up and spread out over the geocaches i visit. same activity, different venue. and i got over seventy logs behind largely because instead of writing my logs, i was keeping a blog.

so i kind of wanted to get caught up in the logs before i came back here and on top of it all, i've been spending time on the road.

maybe next time i write i'll have something interesting to say.