It seems that a great lot of what I have written here is about being behind, not on course or just generally in The Vortex of Crazy.
No one that has known me for any length of time would be surprised by that.
There's always something epic going on with me. I'm not actually fond of that fact. I've often been known to say, "My kingdom for a little mediocrity."
Another one of my favorite witty diatribes is reserved for when some tid-bit of my off kilter epicness slips out into conversation, all matter of fact like, with someone uninitiated with the insanity of the plot devices deployed in my actual real life. They invariably raise an eyebrow or are generally gobsmacked by my epic misfortune and conversation comes to a screeching halt while they try to reconcile my ability to remain upright in the face of *pick one there are many.*
It's generally then that I deploy a nice little speech that I have honed to reassure people with humor that I am aware but I'm okay. It goes something like this, "Truth is stranger than fiction and my life is as if a LifeTime TV Movie of the Week had a torrid love affair with a Pat Conroy novel. Then the love child of that union ran off with an unpublished Faulkner work. It's okay, but really you can not make this stuff up. You just learn to laugh at it."
In early January of this year that little speech was overheard and while I don't remember the exact response from the person who walked into it being delivered...it was along the lines of "Whoa, that's rough and yeah that about sums it up."
You see, the person who walked into me...once again...diffusing with humor one of my incredibly bad situations was the paramedic who had just finished up tending to my husband and making sure he wasn't suffering from smoke inhalation. The sun still hadn't come up, our house was still on fire and my entire family was taking up space at my neighbor's house and I was laughing because "Of course this happened...why didn't I see this coming."
In the aftermath I wrote a piece for our local news blog. It can be found here.
It's been a few months now. It's been all manner of weird, hard and stressful. It's also been a new start.
As much as it stinks worse than a rotting skunk to lose the vast majority of your worldly possessions, have your life turned upside down and navigate troop movements of a large family with none of the creature comforts one is use to...there is also something liberating in getting to redefine your life from scratch.
So, I'm blogging again. I'm blogging because I should have been making time for this all along. I'm blogging because the changes that came blew away all the chaff that piled up around me preventing me from getting to it. I'm blogging again because I have something to talk about that isn't just me once again not getting stuff done.
I'm blogging because once again tragedy struck and ended one way of life and brought about another.
While we rebuild our beautiful historic home (talk about epic projects) we decided to make lemon ice box pie out of a sack full of lemons.
We bought a building in our lovely Historic Down Town district. It will serve as head quarters for the family and our new family business. A business that until now consisted of me vainly trying to make a go of it out of a dedicated patch of our home.
With just a bit of remodeling we'll live upstairs while we rebuild a house and build up Southern Carnival as a real and true bricks and mortar business on the ground floor.
We've got grand plans. I hope you'll stick around to watch them come to fruition.
