Yes, I know, it's been a while. Christmas always seems to knock my blogging off-kilter. There's just so much to do, what with decorating and festivities and a bajillion cookies to make and some writing and teaching shoehorned into the middle of all that...What's that? You think I exaggerate when I lay claim to a bajillion cookies? Oh ho ho, my friends. Behold!Plus pumpkin fudge and green tea marshmallows (OMG YES) and Turkish delight, which is like eating soft and beautiful rose-flavored clouds. I could hoover that all day long.The last few years have had rough beginnings/endings to them. Two years ago, January ushered in back-to-back funerals and the most vicious stomach flu I've had in a decade. A year ago in December, George and I got into that terrible car accident and totaled our Honda.And just last week, as I was getting set to emerge from the Christmas cocoon without a funeral or a car accident in sight (all good things!), I dropped my external hard drive and broke some kind of connector thingie inside. The hard drive had EVERY SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH I'VE EVER TAKEN (more or less, minus what was on my phone, and the few files I've loaded onto the new computer) on it, moved there after my old computer's hard drive died on me earlier this year. It is dead to me and all my photos are completely inaccessible. Yes, I know I should be in the cloud and your well-meaning point has been taken, but that advice? Is no good to me right now.To say I laid around for two days wallowing in despair...that's not so much of a dramatic re-interpretation of my days as it is a spot-on description of what I did. Every. Photograph. Thousands and thousands of them. (For those of you who know I've written a book, don't worry. The book is the safest thing I have, backed up in several places--including a copy in my email--and sent in full to the writing partner. At least there's that.) As we speak my hard drive has been sent off to a data retrieval service, and so I wait. And wait. At least I've crawled out of my apoplectic coma. The howling in my head has stopped. And I feel the need to write again. These are all good things.So. Here is one of the few photos I currently have in my possession, taken in a nearby corn field on a cloudy, yet bright, day.Ever forward.