Seriously, what can you say after an absence of eleven long months?

There were times during that span I thought I must have had some kind of premonition, that I’d had a little precognitive flash when I put up my post of February 22, 2008, the one explaining the ins and outs of my day job and why it might occasionally keep me away from the blog. Did I know something when I wrote that piece? Had I sensed that I was about to disappear for nearly a year?

Not really, no.

On the other hand, the post did become a convenient excuse, at least during the first few months. When I was being pulled in other directions and starting to feel guilty about neglecting this site, I always had that post to fall back on.

Inner Voice: You really should post something new one of these days.

Other Inner Voice: Don’t worry. You can get to it later. You’ve got time. Remember, you warned them how busy you are and that you might vanish for extended periods. Relax.

After a while, of course, so much time had gone by that even my last post wasn’t enough. A bigger, more thorough, more honest explanation was required. But by then I was in No Man’s Land, a mysterious territory that so many errant bloggers know so well, wanting to get back to it but unsure how to proceed, knowing I would have to come up with a decent cover story but not capable of doing it. Ask anyone who has maintained a Web site for a while but wandered from the path: the longer you stay away, the harder it is to return. The longer you avoid it, the easier it is to keep avoiding it.

There comes a day, however, that the lure of the blog, the siren song of the site, overpowers everything else and you just have to get back to it. And here I am.

Do I have a story, something to explain where I’ve been? Oh, yeah, you bet I do, and believe me, that post from eleven months back only touches the surface. It’s been a year of trauma and drama, tempest and turmoil, most of it far away from the day job. It’s been a year of accidents and illness for those closest to me. It’s been a year of being pushed and pulled in different directions and head-spinning changes and uncertainty and fear and doubt and … well, upheaval.

But I’m not yet ready to tell that story, at least not right here, right now, all in one big chunk. Bits of pieces of it will no doubt spill out over time, and clever readers will surely be able to stitch those fragments together into a workable narrative. So for those of you who are truly curious, I guess you’ve got that to look forward to.

For the rest of you, let’s just wipe the slate and make a clean start, forget the last eleven months and focus on what’s ahead. I’m here. I’m ready to go. I’m happy you’re here, too. And I’m excited about getting back to regular communication with you, to maintaining these pages, to doing all of this cyberspacey kind of stuff, which is really more fun than most folks should be allowed to have.

Here’s to the journey … and let’s get started.

Stand by. Posting should resume shortly.

So, happy birthday to … me, I guess!

And more important, thanks to all of you for hanging around and putting up with my (somewhat too sporadic) outpouring of miscellany and disorder. I hope you found the first year interesting and occasionally worthwhile. It’s been a fun journey so far, and I’m very glad to have you by my side.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with me this far. I look forward to seeing you (and hearing from you) often in 2008!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I owe a huge hug to my sister for finding an odd problem on the comment form, one I never would have found myself since … well, I generally don’t make a habit of commenting on my own posts. It seems the button to submit comments was trying to send them somewhere else, somewhere way out on the dark side of cyberspace. But that’s all fixed now. Needless to say, if anyone comes across any other glitches, be sure to let me know.

I’m sure I’ll be doing some more tinkering behind the scenes in the coming days, but the big, noticeable changes should be done. So we can now return you to your regular programming.

And just for the record: this is what my “Plan B” design would have looked like. Did I make the right choice?

For several reasons, technical, practical and aesthetic, I’ve been working on a redesign for this site. At this point, everything appears to be in order and seems to be working.

As a warning, though, the layout you’re looking at now may not actually be the final version. I’m hemming and hawing, torn between two quite-different themes which both accomplish the things I’ve been trying to do. In fact, if you dropped in at just the right moment yesterday, you might have seen the other design, which I put up several times for comparison purposes. You might see it again over the next week or so. In other words, don’t be surprised if the appearance of these pages changes back and forth a bit. It’s not a technical disaster, and it’s not a permanent state of flux. It’s just me being indecisive. I promise to finish this off as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, please drop me a note and let me know what you think. Look all right? Feel good? Also, click around a bit, check the archives, search, dig. If you find something that doesn’t look or work right, shout. I’d appreciate it.

Sometimes, when you’re apologizing for something you should have done but didn’t, you might have a perfectly valid excuse. Sometimes your excuse is a little half-assed and lamebrained. And sometimes you have no excuse at all.

In my case, I think it’s probably a bit of all three.

If I tried, and if I really wanted to, I could fill long pages with detailed explanations of my summer, which actually included just about everything but a vacation. I could tell you about all the up-and-down-and-inside-out emotions of getting my daughters ready to go off to the University of Michigan, where they are now in their third week, and quite happily ensconced, thank you very much. I could tell you about the craziness in my day job, the way a usually quiet season when not much happens in the news business became instead a feverish hell of breaking stories and special meetings. I could tell you how I worked myself to a point that felt dangerously close to exhaustion or collapse, and how, when I wasn’t working, I didn’t have much energy or enthusiasm left over for much of anything else — blogging least of all. I could tell you a lot, but it wouldn’t really serve any purpose, and frankly it all sounds kind of depressing when you say it out loud or write it down.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t really a depressing summer at all. It was just busy. It was a roller coaster. It was, well, life.

So now we know. Life isn’t just what happens when you’re busy making other plans; it’s what happens when you should be blogging.

For now, I’m back. I’m reading and writing and working and playing and trying to make sure that I carve out time for all those things that got swept aside, or merely ignored, over the past few months.

And I’m blogging.

Wow. You know what? It feels really, really good to be here.

I’ve begun the fine-tuning of the bookstore. The bagpipe pages, for example, now feature music from my own list of favorites instead of a generic selection. Much of it is also bagpipe music that should appeal to the — gasp! — non-bagpipe enthusiasts among you, including some groups that really know how to rock. More bookstore updates will follow in the weeks ahead, so keep watching.

Also, I meant to mention yesterday, but didn’t, that SixDegrees.org is a partnership with the wonderful Network for Good. Please visit them and learn more about a very easy way to support some very worthy causes.

While I haven’t been posting, I haven’t been neglecting the site completely. For starters, I created a little Amazon bookstore. It’s not finished yet. The front page is fine; it contains some of my current recommendations. The interior pages are another matter. Right now, they’re just generic listings of books and music, sorted by category and keyword. Eventually, I’ll pair those listings down so that they’re a bit more personal, containing items I’ve hand-selected instead of every single item Amazon sells with the keyword “horror” or “bagpipes” or what have you.

If you’d like to check it out, you can find the link toward the bottom of the sidebar, right below the Amazon search box. Or, even easier, you can just click here:

My Amazon Store

The other, more important project is the “badge” I added to the sidebar to let visitors make donations to some very worthwhile charities related to literacy, the arts and education — for example, Chely Wright’s Reading, Writing and Rhythm Foundation. You don’t like country music? That’s okay, neither do I. But I love the things that Chely’s organization does to promote arts in the schools, and to help schools that might not have a music program without outside support.

The badge comes from Kevin Bacon’s amazing SixDegrees.org, a project that shows something good can come out of a silly game, and that social networking can be about something other than geeky buzzwords and self-obsessed Myspace pages full of bad grammar and spelling.

You can find the badge at the bottom of the sidebar. Take a look. Who knows? You might even feel moved to click one or two of the “donate” buttons.

Using tags will allow a deeper, more complete, more intuitive level of search and navigation than the simple categorization of posts. And they’re fun, since they can include keywords that are sensible and straightforward or lighthearted and odd.

I’ve not yet had time to go back and add tags to all the existing posts, but I’ve finished some of them, which should give you a good feel for how it will work. Eventually, at the end of every post you’ll find a list of tags. If you want to find other posts with the same keywords, just click, and off you’ll go.

Even better, you can use this entertaining tag cloud to find your way around the archives.

On another note, it looks as if the White Sox and Indians will play this afternoon, despite the bone-chilling temperatures (almost 40 degrees colder than yesterday) and some wind damage that occurred overnight at U.S. Cellular Field. We’re practicing our shivering and teeth-chattering now, so we should be all set.