For the past few months I have been tossing about the idea of shutting down Caloden and getting on with better things to do with my time. Because really, a blog? The kind where I reveal what a hot mess I am to the great unknown of the Internet? Kinda creepy. I used to not think so so much until I realized people I know were actually reading my emotional drivel. So I quit for awhile and maybe now nobody will read this and I can start pecking away at the keyboard again. Because the truth is that I’ve missed writing about the mundaneness of my trivial day to day existence. Also, I am absolute crap at scrapbooking, never tried it in my life, and the time with my kids is slipping away. So if I am to chronicle their lives at all it will be here, in public. Poor souls. But it’s true. Loren is 16 1/2 and could potentially graduate in 18 months and perhaps even leave this crazy next of a home we call The Manor. And what then? I won’t have a photo album to give to him for his journeys, but a URL? Oh yeah, honey, that’s the kind of stellar mom I am.

So I’m going to give it another stab. And why not? Life got significantly better, even spectacular if I’m going to be butt out honest here, in the last half of 2009. I learned that wheat and gluten are not my friends and once I stopped eating them I stopped feeling the constant nausea and shakiness I had felt for nearly six years. Cassidy and I reached a peaceful marker in our relationship and had more fun than I can ever remember us having. And I re-met a man. A kind, fabulous, gorgeous man who, although he sucks at ski ball and currently lives 900 miles away in the Texan badlands, has brought light back into my life and given me a reason to laugh at myself. Not bad, all of it, and really quite good. So here’s to 2010! May it be filled with more smiles than not!

Devon and my mom and I went out to walk on the snow yesterday. It always thrills me that my kids like this cold white stuff so much since I am always fighting the urge to pack up our flip flops and move to the equator.