Well.

It’s certainly been a long several months since I last posted. So many issues between then and now…it’s enough to make me a hermit.

When Karen died I pretty much put a lot of things in my own life on hold. Karen was always dear to my heart. To realize how she suffered and to ponder what she must have gone through tore me apart. This is the Doll, more than the Ninja, who sees a kid with a cut on his arm and feels her insides contract. I absorb the pain in other human being so readily that it’s hardly a stretch to play an empath in my favorite FRPG. As the information about Karen’s illness slowly made its way to me, I withdrew from everyone around me. I was holed up in my room with the spectre of her pain and the fear that this, too, could be my pain when it’s my time to go. Not the same illness, perhaps, not the same circumstances…but similar. Karen and I were barely a year apart in age. She is not the first friend I have lost, but she is the one who, for me, was the brightest light of intelligence, humor and exemplary selflessness. And since we had never spoken words to each other that weren’t in text, odd as that may sound to the rest of you, Karen became the goddess of all things flawless. She was everything unattainable by me.

I once told her that. She laughed her head off. “Of course you want to be me,” she replied. “You wouldn’t have all =your= problems if you were me!” “Do you have any problems?” I asked, smirking. She thought a while, then said, “No.” We both laughed for what seemed like an hour.

Slowly, as always happens, my mutilated psyche reassembled itself — as it turned out, just in time for me to deal with a massive viral infection of our computer systems at work. One has to admire an IT professional dealing with dozens of routers, dozens of servers, hundreds of computers, hundreds of mindless authorized users. In my closely held company, with its one server, six computers and several well-meaning authorized users (one of them being my boss, the root of all computer evil), several hundred instances of five very nasty viruses and all their mutated muck attached themselves to email, word documents, graphics files, you name it. Our internet stream was clogged with viral debris. No single solution worked. It took three weeks, several software diagnostics and a very understanding technician from Cowabunga Computers (I kid you not) to ferret every little bug-part from our system.

Theresince, I have been mired in computer woes at home and at work, and while my health is just fine and dandy and my head is more or less as together as it will ever be, I’m now focused on issues pertaining to my mother.

It seems, at times like these, that I was bred for problem-solving. Enough of them erupt on a timely basis that I go through life wondering when I will ever find the time to problem-solve myself.

In the meantime…aloha to all of you, I’ve missed the daily blogging, the eruptions of giddy humor and the passion of following your daily lives as closely as one can from the middle of the Pacific. More when I have time.