Date with Opossum at 10:22 p.m.

Do you ever promise yourself multiple nights in a row that you’ll do some particular thing (for instance, work on a new blog post or try to find a literary agent) but then get so busy with Stuff that all of a sudden it’s nearly midnight and you collapse into a chair on the patio with a glass of wine and kick your feet up for the first time in hours and mentally calculate how many hours you’ll be able to sleep before it’s time to get up and get dressed and be somewhere annoyingly “professional” and ironically, you just can’t seem to think of exactly what has kept you so busy that you haven’t been able to keep that original promise to yourself?

I’m nipping this cycle in the bud, right here and now at 10:16 p.m…just far enough ahead of “nearly midnight” that I haven’t started thinking about how much sleep I’ll get tonight. Except that I have. But it doesn’t matter. However much it is, it’s enough. It is what it is. Maybe this is the difference between 10:16 and 11:59. Oh…woops…it’s 10:22.

My dearest Kiddos, Krazies, Kamikazees, Kippers, Skippers, Dippers, and Trippers, et al...et alii, et alibi, et cetera, y esto perpetua - es verdad - I'm back! Anyone been playing with online thesauri lately? Not I, said the blind man (as he picked up his hammer and saw). Heh heh. This is what happens when I get "too busy" to keep up with my writing. It bottles up and I ignore it and pressurize it and mull on it and consider it (but still mostly ignore it) until one random day, evening, and/or Time Warp Moment, it all bubbles out and jumbles my brain into a (beautifully abstract?) stream of words that explode through my fingertips and, in this case, make their mark on the World Wide Interweb.

As you know by now, the emails I’m posting on this blog are worded exactly as they were when I sent them out from the road, while Jax and I were traveling through South America together. The next email that’s waiting in the wings to be posted here was originally sent out on November 8th of 2006, and it’s a long one…which means that my blog-post intro will likely be a long one as well. I just can’t help myself sometimes. :)

…so now it’s nearly 1:00 a.m….I had every intention of posting another travel story tonight, but a (very random) opossum spent the better part of this evening past 10:22 p.m. makin

g quiet little I-might-be-a-burglar noises on my patio and so, after discovering the offending animal, I spent the better part of this evening past 10:23 p.m. shopping for Mace and Maglights on Amazon. That’s right, Nasty Opossum. I’m prepared now. Or at least…I will be prepared in 3 – 5 business days.

I will also post my next South American travel story within the next day or so. I promise.