I do still exist....

...though you wouldn't know it from my presence here lately. Sorry about that. And thanks to Kara for her comment, which sort of "woke me up" again. I have been reading comments, hence the May changeover to deal with the brief bout of spam. (Don't people have anything better to do?)

Not sure yet, where I go from here, but somewhere, perhaps. Hopefully.

Why did I vanish? Er...well, I got busy and then I got uninspired and then I didn't do things so I was busy and uninspired. And I got way, way behind on reading other people's blogs so that I felt guilty, then depressed at the "workload" awaiting me. Yes, I can be silly. Sorry 'bout that. I hope I am back now but the proof will be in whether I keep posting and reading, I suppose....

Since I haven't posted for over a month, and even that post wasn't meaningful, how 'bout some updates? (If you don't want updates but you do want vacation pictures, scroll down 'til you see 'em start. :)

• Morning Pages and all other vestiges of the Artist's Way...yeah right. Vanished. Perhaps I should work on picking up the Artist's Dates again, and some variation of daily journalling. Something. One step at a time, though: for now I am picking up this blog again. If I do too many things at once, I will simply overwhelm myself right back away. That's not even amusing, let alone useful....
• Allergies. My shots have been in maintenance since the round that sent me to the ER in January. The intent is to keep them there at least through the end of summer, then evaluate. However, I've had two dosages drop (one because that happens whenever you hit a new bottle, one due to a reaction), so I'm presently trying to go in frequently enough to step up. It's amazing how reactions that would have just caused me to shrug before make me worry now. Not very surprising, I suppose, but I am anxious each time I go for shots. The next is Monday. I'd like to get back up to maintenance on those two, but....
• Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. This follows naturally from allergies since the oils include some things I am allergic to. I don't use them for a week before I go in for shots, but they seem to be just fine in general. They might even be fine with the shots but I simply do not want to chance it. I have an order in with the lab for a lot of other samples of scents to try, and for bottles for two of my favorites - Wicked, which is very nice, and Dragon's Eye which is melt-me-down lovely, a piercing lilac scent that means joy to me. The lab very nicely responded to my question about which one have tree-nut oils in, which are the only ones I'm avoiding altogether.
• The mask. Um. I've added one thing to it. I can't find anything else in my supplies that belongs, and yet, it doesn't feel finished either. Apparently I have no idea what to do with it, other than ignore it.
• Poetry. I submitted to one place. They form-rejected it. I haven't submitted again. This is partly discouragement and partly fear and partly lack of time and partly I need to find more places to submit. I have one, but they publish only once a year and that won't be for over 6 months. And it'd be nice to have some credit first because they get a lot of submissions, publish few. But the other options I have identified so far...I don't want to be published in. Needless to say I am not gonna submit to them.
• Other art/creativity. In a nutshell: yeah, right. I haven't made time for much but scrambling place to place with the exception of a bit of photography on our vacation.

This is not to say there haven't been good things also during the downtime, even if I am feeling busy and scattered and distracted. I got my copy of a friend's live CD (from her concert at the OVFF filk convention), Pretty Little Dead Girl, and I really really enjoy the music (check it out if you are curious, it can be ordered online at the moment but I'm not sure how long she plans to keep that up - I think just 'til the filk dealers have it in stock - there are samples and even a full-length song available from the site).

And Scott and I went to the beach for several days and had a lovely time. My photos for that are up on Flickr, and I've included the thumbnails below.