So I told y'all I was going out for a pack of cigarettes...

...and, hey, I didn't come back.  I feel a little bad about that since, actually, I don't smoke.  I live in California and if you even try to smoke here, Gov. Jerry Brown will find you, body slam you and pin you down until you promise to never EVER even THINK about smoking within the boundaries of the state.  Pot smoking, however, seems to be a-ok.

But I digress.  Why did I take off for almost two years?

So many reasons actually.  Sometimes the things you have to do take precedence over the things that you want to do.  And then other things that you want to do pop up and you have to take advantage.

Long story short...Jane got tabled.  (That sounds sexual...I swear it's not.)

But I was really really really busy.  Pinky swear.  To wit...

• I took the Princess to Europe for 2 weeks.  Italy and Germany.  There's at least one or 15 blogs in there somewhere.

• I got back together with the Boy....which actually happened about 0.5 seconds after I stopped writing Jane.  Completely unrelated.  I think.  (Actually, it was the Boy who told me that I should start writing Jane again.  However, I suspect that it had more to do with the fact that the day after I turned in my masters thesis, I was all "I'm booooooooooooooored" in my best whiny Fran Drescher voice.)

• They found a tumor in my neck and I had to have surgery.  It was benign and everything, but I think it might be worth some future commentary and/or a public service announcement.

• I discovered that going back to school is WAY UNFUN!  But it's also almost over.  I just have to defend my thesis next month.  And I will do everything necessary to defend the damn thing - even if it involves boxing gloves or lightsabers or those way cool flaming swords I just saw on Game of Thrones.  May the force be with me.

• I worked.  I drank.  I survived another year(s) of teenage angst.  I went to a bunch of baseball games.  I only have FIVE more baseball stadiums to visit to before I have them all.  

But I missed writing for writing's sake.  Does that make sense?  I mean, I've been doing a LOT of writing for school.  More than I have in a very very long time.  But it's all writing that's grammatically correct and cited and researched and, ugh, defensible.  In other words, completely painful.  It's also a really a hard habit to break, and if I knew how to add footnotes in Blogger, I'd be citing the shit out of this just cuz I could.

So read it, or don't, but I promise not to go out for cigarettes for awhile.  I'm afraid of Jerry Brown.