This stuff drives me crazy

I know I'm a little behind the times, but I just stumbled upon this Nov. 17 article from Forbes.com, which has not one but two reporters listed in the byline. And yet it's still riddled with inaccuracies about Sharesleuth.com and BailoutSleuth.com, both of which Chris edits. In an article about the highly questionable SEC charges recently brought against Chris' partner Mark Cuban, Forbes.com writes:

He started a Web site, sharesleuth.com, in 2006 and hired a professional journalist to uncover faulty finances at small publicly traded companies. Trouble was, Cuban made no secret of betting against those companies as a short-seller. That, of course, led to criticism that he could manipulate stocks to his advantage using the Web site.

Sigh. I know that only eight people read this blog, but I guess I need all of them to know the following:

1. Mark did not start the website and hire Chris. Chris wanted to start a newsletter or organization to uncover stock fraud. He approached Mark with the initial idea and Mark agreed to fund the project, which ultimately became Sharesleuth.com.
2. Only some of the companies Sharesleuth.com has investigated are even publicly traded. Thus, Mark doesn't and can't short stocks on many of them.
3. In truth, Mark hasn't actually completed a short on any of the stories to date.
4. If Mark does make money shorting the stock of a company Sharesleuth.com writes about, he has pledged that money towards financing additional investigations -- not pocketing the profits himself. This is, to my mind, an extremely important detail, one Chris has mentioned to the press again and again -- and yet one which has not been included in any press coverage of the site.

In addition, the Forbes.com article states:

Sharesleuth has since morphed into bailoutsleuth.com, which is tracking the government's bailout of the financial industry.

Again, not true. BailoutSleuth.com is a completely separate site from Sharesleuth.com. Chris edits and writes the majority of the entries for both, but they're separate entities. One did not become the other. Seems like that would be an extremely easy thing to figure out.

Yeah, I know. It's not going to make a difference to whine about it here. I just find it extremely depressing that the media are constantly lazy, picking up on and repeating misconceptions and untruths about my husband's sites just because someone wrote it before. A quick phone call to the source for a little fact-checking and the truth, as they say, would be out there.

And now I'm done. Go on about your day.

Really?

I haven't posted since my online boast about my birthday weekend? That seems impossible. And yet, given a) my track record of irregular posting and b) the fact that not much is going on right now, it also seems entirely believable. I'm just coming off the post-Thanksgiving recovery period. We had turkey day at our house this year. My sister, her husband, their two youngest and my younger brother all came up for the big day and it went swimmingly. It's amazing, however, how much time and planning and effort goes into what basically boils down to 30 minutes of high-speed ingesting and then it's all over. Kind of like that Christmas morning thing with the piles of wrapping paper and everyone kind of dazed, thinking, "Now what?"

I learned a few things, which I will share with you:

1. Despite what you might think, four pies for seven people is not too much.
2. That said, seven people in a house with one bathroom IS too much.
3. I will probably never be able to properly gauge portions of mashed potatoes. I always make enough for a small army.

May those nuggets of wisdom make future holidays smoother at your house.

I have to say that I immensely enjoyed being the host for this year's dinner. I love our little house and our little life here in Ann Arbor and it's so nice to be able to share that with people -- and so nice that people want to share it. We played games and enjoyed a seemingly endless fire in the fireplace and had some friends over Friday night. We wandered the shops downtown and started picking up the first of the stocking stuffers. And we even made what may have been our only misstep -- a trip to Ikea on Saturday. So packed. So stupid.

Everyone left on Saturday, late afternoon, which left us with what felt like a bonus day at the end of the weekend. We made good use of it, too, spending Sunday in full decompression mode, lying on the couch in front of the fire, making a small dent in our DVR backlog (and taking in The Visitor), and watching fat, fluffy snowflakes blanket everything outside. Perfection.

Damn, we're a good looking bunch

As promised, some photos of the KWF Class of '06 mini-reunion that took place here in Ann Arbor last weekend. For those of you who made it, we miss you already. For those of you who didn't, we talked about you.

Our first night we met up at Grizzly Peak, only there are no pics of that since I forgot my camera. We had fun, though. I promise! Even if it wasn't caught on film. The next night, the venue was Casey's for burgers and gigantic onion rings. That's Kim, above, for those who don't know. We blame this entire reunion on her, since she was hell bent on coming all the way to the states from Sydney to see Obama get elected. We didn't disappoint. Good job, nation! See how happy she looks?

Graham came from Boston and Vanessa drove from Chicago before she heads to DC for grad school in public policy. Yay!

Vanessa gets some lovin' from Sweet Tony, who made the trek from Pittsburgh, and Steve, who was in the states doing election coverage for the BBC and made a stop in Ann Arbor before heading back to London.

Kim had to make amends here to her husband Gerard for succumbing to Tony's charms. You're only human, Kim. Don't blame yourself!

You'd never guess these ladies are stuffed full of burritos. They look so... so... glamorous. That's Kim, Rainey and Vanessa at Big 10 Cantina. (If it seems like all we did was eat, it's because it's pretty much true.)

I seriously have no idea what Gerard and Graham are doing here. Only Tony seems to know there's a picture happening! (Check out more snaps, if you like, in my Flickr set.)

Reunited. Yes, it felt so good.

Haven't posted in days. Loads of excuses. Been busy. Been tired. Even been writing. And now I've a stupid cold. But I figured that in my current position -- under a blanket on the couch, in front of a roaring fire, with a pot of peppermint tea and my laptop -- I should at least get something up here. This past weekend, we had a mini-reunion of some of our classmates from the '06 Knight-Wallace Fellowship. Or pals Kim and Gerard came to the states from Sydney, Australia just to be here for the election. (They were lucky enough to learn of Obama's victory while in The Daily Show audience -- and celebrated afterwards at the show's star-studded party.) They were spending the bulk of their trip in Boston with our friends Graham and Raney, so the foursome headed back to Ann Arbor for a little nostalgia-fest.

As it happens, our classmate Steve was traveling through Detroit on his way home from London after doing some election coverage for the BBC. We convinced fellow Fellows Tony and Vanessa to come from Pittsburgh and Chicago, respectively. With Fara, John, Birgit and Chris already in town -- and Jamie and Amy just over in Ferndale -- it made for quite a gang, lots of comings and goings, combos of folk from Thursday through Monday.

What we did was largely what we did during our Fellowship year: ate too much, drank too much, talked about journalism, politics and everything else and a lot of late nights. We shared stories, a ridiculous amount of laughter and even, apparently, some germs. So you'll just have to wait until the next post for a few photos of our jollarity. Can you stand it? Can you wait that long? Yeah, I know. But try.

Obama

"putting this in God's hands...the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4."-- Sarah Palin, October 22, 2008

Well, then.

It was nearly 70 degrees in Ann Arbor today. The most beautiful, sunny fall day. Breezes and rays of light illuminating the trees. Almost like something really, really good was on the horizon.

I just drove my friend Sarah home after a small but raucous election-watching bash at my place. At nearly 1 in the morning midweek, the Ann Arbor roads were practically empty. In stark contrast to the TV crowds cheering and yelling in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, everything I passed looked quiet and peaceful. Almost like the world was unaware that an incredible change was underway.

The sky right now is packed with a million, zillion stars, every constellation you can imagine out there on full display. Glorious. Almost like if God was up there, he or she was thinking that this would be a stellar way to celebrate that the right thing for America was done.

The time is now

It's today. By which I mean it's Tuesday. Not just any Tuesday. It's that Tuesday. Are you nervous? Are you excited? I feel it in my toes, the sense that we're participating in history. That years from now, we'll be able to tell people exactly where we were the night America finally elected its first African-American president, the night the tides changed. Or, perhaps, where we were the night the evil powers that be stole the biggest election in history and people took to the streets rioting.

I'm just that cynical.

My husband keeps walking around with a wee bit of a swagger, the walk of a man who got in and out of the booth at the elementary school nice and early. He keeps saying things like, "It's in the bag." While I have to admit that I have hope -- especially since I read this morning that Karl Rove, Republican evil incarnate, has predicted an Obama landslide -- I also fear the power of jinx.

How's a girl supposed to get anything done today, I ask you?

The election!!!!

It's less than a week away. Can you stand it? Can you even stand it?

I'm old

Next month, the weekend after Thanksgiving, my 20 year high school reunion is slated to take place in Louisville. Let me repeat that so that shock can sink in: twenty years. Consequently, there has been a flurry of recent activity via email and, of all places, Facebook as members of my high school class seek out one another and send missives and messages about The Big Event. If you know me at all, you can probably safely guess that I'm not going. Logistics aside -- it's a long trip and we have family slated to come here to Michigan for turkey day and blah blah blah -- I'm just not the reunion-y type. I don't even watch TV shows where people reunite. Truth be told, I didn't love high school and I'm wildly suspicious of anyone who did. I mean, you meet those people for whom high school was the best years of their lives and I can't help but think they've done something wrong since then. At the very least, college should have been way better if for no other reason than lack of parental supervision and access to greater quantity and/or quality of drugs.

As much as I like to play that tiny violin, high school probably wasn't as torturous and lonely and miserable as I like to make it out. It's possible -- nay, probable -- that I had some fun, I had some friends. How bad can the years be when you first get high, smoke menthol cigarettes until you vomit or drink Bacardi 151 until you pass out? Good times.

In fact, I'm finding that I probably had more friends than I remember or maybe than I realized at the time. (Although I think time blurs all that and when you can't really remember people from high school, you all just act like you were friends even if they kicked your head in and stuffed you in a locker every afternoon.) I do think that there is a necessary and natural selection process that occurs post-graduation. You stay in touch with the people who meant the most to you or, if nothing else, with whom you spent the greatest number of Friday nights, and if you fade out of each other's lives, then Darwin would approve. After all, the odds that we as under-developed teen social blobs would know enough about ourselves and the world, let alone those around us, to form life long friendships are pretty slim.

That's not to say that I'm absent any curiosity about what happened to this person or that. But technology has changed the stakes in that game. If you really want to know what happened to a classmate, a quick Google search can often answer your question and, if you're so inclined, put you in touch. And the brilliant part is you never actually have to talk to them if you don't want to. So you can find out if that asshole from home room was nailed for insider trading but you don't have to feign civility over coffee. That's brilliant!

Now Facebook -- which I am sheepish to admit I enjoy immensely -- has added a whole new dimension. You can easily find classmates, "friend" them and sort of keep tabs on them without actually having in-depth conversations. It's deeply impersonal and completely superficial in the best way possible. It's often just the right amount of curiosity-quenching contact you want with someone you haven't seen in a coupla decades.

I've enjoyed exchanging messages with a few folk on Facebook, people I hadn't talked to since graduation. But it seems to me that we're sort of all caught up now, aren't we? I mean, we know where we are, what we're doing, all the major facts, etc. Which strikes me as the right level of information for relationships that exist squarely in the past. I'm not sure I see the point in taking it a step further. Yeah, yeah. I'm a curmudgeon.

I wonder sometimes if I'd had a happier high school experience, would I be more gung-ho about attending reunions like these? Maybe. All I know is that I'm finding ways to satisfy my curiosity without getting up fromm my desk. I'm not too crazy about that part of my past anyway and I really, really like my present. So I figure I'll just hang out here for now.

Obama in St. Louis

I just have to say how thrilled at and proud of  St. Louis I am right now, after an estimated 100,000 Obama supporters turned out for a rally downtown Saturday. (Check out the photograph in this Post-Dispatch story -- the sea of people with the court house in the background is truly breathtaking.) It's said to be his biggest crowd in the midwest to date. What a lovely thing.

And while we're on the topic, I'm still blown away by Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama yesterday blew me away. This is Bush's former secretary of state, people. A vocal and staunch Republican. If he's willing to publicly acknowledge just how bad McCain would be for this nation, then I remain perplexed and stunned that anyone is still considering voting for that scary, sickly, cranky old man and his folksy frightening cohort.

I made a pie! I made a pie!

Yeah, maybe not that big a deal to you, but it is my First Pie Ever. (Actually, my first two pies ever, as I doubled up on the recipe.)

That's right.

Made them -- with help from my faithful assistant Sarah -- using the Ida Reds we picked yesterday at the fruit farm. I used Martha Stewart's pate brisee recipe for the crust and it turns out pie crust is pretty easy to make, so I don't know what everyone's always belly-achin' about. I used Martha's old fashioned apple pie recipe too, only I went Euro and left out the cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and relied on just sugar and some lemon for flavor.

I forgot to take a pic before people dug in, so the shot above is what was left at evening's end. Still pretty, no? And tasted pretty good, too. Not too tart and not too sweet, not laden with cloying spices. And I don't know that I'll become a piemaker or anything, but if anyone has tips for a pie crust that's just a tad flakier, I'd be willing to listen.

Random Notes

Blogging I've been struggling with Wordpress, my blogging software, as of late. Seems whenever there's an upgrade -- or just randomly -- I lose the ability to log in and write blog entries. Seems renaming the old plug ins folder (through FTP access to the server) and creating a new, empty plug ins folder does the trick. I mention it here on the off chance any of you have encountered the same problem and are ready to pull your hair out.

Reading

I rarely read Maureen Dowd, but I have to say that her October 4 column in the New York Times hits on two things I despise passionately: Sarah Palin and bad grammar.

On the book front, I'm digging into author Jennifer Traig's second memoir of sorts, "Well Enough Alone." It's an often very funny glimpse at hyponchondria as a historical phenomenon and its impact on her own life. (In a strange, small-world turn of events, it seems Traig is married to an acquaintance of mine and has recently moved to Ann Arbor. Hoping I'll get to meet her soon.)

Skipping

Yesterday, I had the opportunity -- and free tickets -- to see Bruce Springsteen perform a live acoustic set at an Obama rally at Eastern Michigan University. While I thought it would be a cool thing to witness, the truth is -- as much as it borders on blasphemy among many of my pals -- I'm just not that into Springsteen. I appreciate the dude as a member of the prole. I admire his unabashed use of politics in his music, including the oft misunderstood and misappropriated "Born in the USA." (Why do both parties use this song at their conventions without listening to the lyrics and realizing it's ironic?)

However, I had much on my plate and the chilly, grey day didn't help convince me to trek over and brave the crowds in the middle of a work day to see him. Will I regret it? Maybe. But I got my work done and slept fine last night, so really, it can't have been that erroneous a choice.

Watching

We just got in the first DVD of the last season of Slings & Arrows, which we've been enjoying for the past few months. It's still sitting in its Netflix wrapper, unopened, as we're painfully aware we're about to embark on the last six episodes of the show. Then it's over. Done. We'll have to move on. And I'll miss it. Good stuff.

Fortunately, I have everything else to distract me. And I do mean everything else. Over the summer, we bit the bullet and got satellite cable, which came with DVR. Which -- will all due respect to electricity and penecillin and the like -- is the best thing every invented. Or, if you're keeping track of how much TV it means I'm watching, perhaps the worst.

The new seasons of shows are starting and that means the episodes are lining up in my DVR like good little soldiers, waiting until I feel like watching them. And fast-forwarding over the commercials. Oh, Dr. House and your ridiculously improbable cases, how good it is to have you back! Californication and Dexter, yay! Boston Legal, Law & Order SVU, Dirty Sexy Money, The Office, Ugly Betty, Pushing Daisies, how I've missed you! And while I'd never confess in a public forum to watching such ludicrous brain-cell-stealers as Gossip Girl and the new 90210, well, I'm not saying I'm not watching them either.

In fact, what am I doing typing this when I could be watching TV?

Six things I love about fall*

1. Leaves. Orangey and red and crunchy and on the ground waiting for you to shuffle through them. There's a school down the block from us and when the kids get out at 3 o'clock I can hear them shuffling through leaves just outside my office window. So even if I'm inside, I can HEAR fall. 2. Bright sunny days with a crisp chill in the air. Turns out Michigan excels at this. (It puts on a good spring, too, but this is it's time to shine.)

3. Sweaters and general bundling-up-ness. The aforementioned should be worn, preferably, with your comfiest jeans and maybe some old boots you've been dying to drag out of storage.

4. Soups and stews. I'm not the world's best cook, but it's hard to go wrong tossing a hodge-podge of produce together and making something warm and hearty. It impresses people disproportionately.

5. Knitting. Sure, I dabble a little in knitting all year round, but fall's when the weight and texture of the yarns really catch my eye again and the idea of hauling around a big, wooly project doesn't seem like insanity.

6. Taking pictures. I enjoy it year-round, but trying to capture the brilliant hues of autumn is one of my very favorite things. Even if all my shots come out looking like Audobon Society calendars. Whatever.

*In case you were wondering.

I might be back

Assuming it isn't too late, that is. Assuming you haven't abandoned ship given the eons since the last post. An explanation may be in order with a content warning for those who are tired of hearing me belly-aching about health problems. I've spent the past 7 weeks or so undergoing a battery of tests -- from EKGs to blood work, etc. -- to try to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. Why I've been exhausted all the time, with little no energy for anything, including writing (which includes, of course, this blog.) Why my heart's been doing some wonky antics. Why my metabolism seems to have ground to a halt, causing me to gain weight even when doing everything in my power to achieve the opposite effect. And why I have this baffling, first-time painful cystic acne on my chin, which will simply not go away.

What my doc has settled on is polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is a metabolic disorder that can account for all my symptoms. That means I've started new meds which will hopefully help resolve all those symptoms and, at the very least, will regulate my metabolism.

I've only been on the meds a few days so my upswing in mood and energy is likely not attributable to that. Part of it is probably the relief in feeling like I have an answer and a course of treatment. But the other part is a factor in my health that I keep trying to ignore: sugar.

I've blogged about my struggles with sugar in the past. I love it. I have what can only be described as an addictive relationship to it. And it makes me feel like crap. It affects my mood, my concentration, my energy level, my sleeping patterns. But I keep going back to the trough and trying it again.

The truth is that I really don't want to refined sugar to be the answer to my problems. I'm being a bit of a toddler about it, stamping my feet and crossing my arms. But I guess I needed to feel as bad and frustrated as I did the past month or so in order to try to make a change again. And it helps. I don't feel 100% by any means just by cutting out added sugar in my diet, but I feel a lot less despondent, I have some energy -- enough to get back to the gym (albeit to work out very lamely) and to other things like, well, writing and blogging.

So I guess we'll see how long it takes for me to forget about it again. In the meantime, I'm blogging! I'm blogging!

Good mail day

Today, I received a catalog called -- I kid you not -- "Pecans, Plain & Fancy." Is that not the funniest thing you've ever heard? No. Must be me. Been laughing for hours over it. This one's a keeper.

Yes, we can...not see you, Obama

So here was our logic: given the small turnout Obama got in Toledo yesterday, and given the fact that it was Labor Day weekend, and the fact that the gates opened at 8:30, we figured we'd be okay arriving in downtown Detroit around 7:45 or 8 am. We were wrong. Sure, there were complicating factors that may have swelled the crowd -- the annual Labor Day Parade, the last day of the Detroit International Jazz Festival and a Tigers game.

But still.

At no point did we imagine that we -- me, Chris, our friend Maggie and her friend Sarah -- would take our places in line at 8:30 and would patiently snake our way around downtown buildings in the beating sun until nearly 11 am only to get nowhere near the entrance gates. And only to experience the entire breakdown of the crowd system after a volunteer told us that they simply didn't have enough volunteers to control the crowd anymore.

The mood, at first, was pretty exhilirating. It's an exciting time, obviously, in politics and we were buoyed by the notion of getting to see Barack Obama in person, if he only seemed a speck in the distance. The crowd was enormous and the mood pretty good, overall. But the whole thing seemed strangely uncoordinated. Given how many people were lining up and given how the line was looping around downtown, we commented repeatedly that it was a miracle that people were behaving in such an orderly fashion.

However, by nearly 11 am -- the time at which Obama was scheduled to speak -- we were nowhere near the front of the line and it was pretty evident that we weren't going to get inside. It was as though most of the crowd realized it at the same time and there was a pretty big rush to volley for positions in front of a big screen and that was as good as it got for us.

We were hot, tired and thirsty and we waited until nearly 11:30 for Obama to take the stage following brief introductory comments by local labor leaders. It was still thrilling to see him on the screen and to know that he was somewhere, you know, over there. Obviously, today's speech was supposed to focus on labor and unions and Obama did make a few remarks about supporting the American worker. Then he said that while he had planned a political speech, today was not the day for political speeches, given Hurrican Gustav's approach to the Gulf Coast. Instead, he asked us to share a moment of silence and to remember the spirit of giving and togetherness and all that good stuff.

The AP says it was a ten minute speech, but only if you count the pauses for applause, some intro banter and the moment of silence. I think it was closer to five. Which, if you had rolled out of bed at 7, as I did, and waited for three and a half hours, could be a bit of a disappointment. Or if you had been in line since 5 am, which many of those who did get into Hart Plaza did.

And it was over. Just like that. The majority of the crowd seemed to be pushing their way over to the Jazz Festival. Some were headed to the Tigers game. Others, like us, were done for and just wanted to get home and hydrated. Am I glad I went? I suppose I am. It's just not what I thought it was going to be. Maybe I was ridiculously naive in thinking I'd catch a glimpse of the man I believe will be our next president.

I will say that it was a particular kind of thrill to be among those throngs of people of all different ethnicities, ages, etc. And there was a lot of -- dare I say it -- hope floating around the joint. If those people are willing to come out and shuffle along in line for hours on end, then surely they'll all make it to the polls to vote. In which case, I guess we'll be seeing a whole lot of change, which will more than make up for not seeing Obama in person.

Aimee Mann, Squeeze in Royal Oak

So I had it a bit wrong. I thought -- clearly underestimating the "nostalgia" pull -- that if Aimee Mann and Squeeze were touring together, surely Mann was the headliner. And it wasn't until we got to the Royal Oak Music Theater (in the Detroit suburb of, you guessed it, Royal Oak) that I realized we had it backwards. Which was kind of fine with me. I was there to see Mann and while I was a big Squeeze fan in my teens, I kind of cringed at the idea of watching an ancient incarnation of a band I used to love. Hits too close to home in the age arena, you know? Chris and I hadn't been to Royal Oak before, so it was interesting in, you know, a not-that-interesting sort of way. (St. Louis readers will appreciate the tip that it reminded me a bit of Kirkwood.) I guess this is where Detroit keeps its white folk. A lot of the same shops you'd find in Ann Arbor with a less charming layout and a train track running right through it. It's entirely possible there's a lot more to it, but I didn't pick up on it.

As soon as we were in line to get inside the theater, we realized this didn't look like an Aimee Mann crowd. How can I explain it? They looked too, like, buoyant and, you know, old. They were wearing too many pastels. In fact, it looked a lot like people had come straight from the golf course to take in a show. But could this really be Squeeze's crowd? The band that helped usher in the new wave/pop madness of the late-seventies and early eighties? (Oddly enough, the answer is, yes, yes, it was.)

The Music Theater is a decent enough space, though if it were spruced up a tad it would be stunning. It has an upper balcony with reserved seating and then a tiered floor plan for general admission, with a handful of cafe tables scattered throughout. I was surprised that you could smoke inside there, but what do I know? We nabbed some good seats at one of the ables and had a stellar view of the stage. (Although the price was very close proximity to speakers stage left.)

Mann was fantastic, in her particularly melancholy sort of way. From what we could hear over the crowd yammering at top volume, her voice was impeccable. As Chris mentioned, if she were able to engage the audience a bit more, it would be even better, but I'm not sure that's the kind of performer or person she is.  Jolly good show, but probably the wrong venue. I'd love to see her somewhere more intimate with a less beer-swillingy crowd.

Next came Squeeze and I sort of had the idea that we'd hear a few songs, then we could head out and get home at a decent hour like good folk. And there is the discomfort of noting that both the band and the audience are, well, old. (Also, I've never seen so many men with gigantic beer bellies at a show because, you know, I don't like country music.)

The original three members of Squeeze -- who, we must remember, joined forces in 1974 -- have all widened and morphed into some combination of Nathan Lane and Tom Conti. (The drummer and keyboardist are not original members, but the former may actually have been Bruce Willis. The keyboardist did his best to match the panache of the now-legendary Jools Holland.) But their voices? Exactly the same. It was surprisingly and powerfully nostalgic.

Squeeze, The Singles was the soundtrack for a lot of my freshman year, one of those albums I bonded with people over and made new friends, the way you seek out these similar threads at college. And they tossed out all the hits -- Tempted, Pulling Muscles from A Shell, Hourglass, Cool for Cats, Goodbye Girl, you name it. It was, in fact, a blast. I love, love, love how music has the power to bring the past rushing back, to dig into some part of you so deep and young and all the stuff that goes with it. Good times, people. Good times.

Man, I can talk.

What was all that bally-hoo about in the previous post? Six days later and I haven't posted a thing about a trip that now ended nearly two weeks ago. What's that about? The truth is, I'm finding myself with both less time and, frankly, less inclination to post to my blog these past few months. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm no longer sure what purpose I want the blog to serve in my writing life. It turns out that, now that I'm focused on a couple of other creative writing projects, the blog falls by the wayside. I don't seem to have the energy for it or seem to be able to find much inspiration for posts.

This incarnation of my blog started when we moved to Ann Arbor in the fall of 2005 for what was supposed to be a temporary spell. I wanted to chronicle our year for friends and family living elsewhere and for myself as a sort of keepsake. When we relocated permanently to Ann Arbor late summer of 2006, it took on a new purpose: chronicling the exploration of a new town and a life that looked very different from the one I had in St. Louis.

But now what? That's what I'm trying to figure out. And I'm well aware that -- although the readership stats haven't dropped a lot, surprisingly enough -- the whole point of blogging is to post regularly. And I ain't got that much to say right now.

So I'm mulling all that over. Trying to decide how best to move forward with this li'l ol' blog. Trying to decide if it serves me as a writer (or if it just serves as a distraction from my writing) or if it's really just a way to stay in touch with friends, family and a handful of readers. Not sure. Not sure. But when I do decide, you'll be the first to know.