Dear Long Lost Blog,

What can I say? To you, my neglected-but-often-thought-of friend, I can say that I'm sorry I've been missing in action AGAIN for so very long. Yep. April 11th, 2010 was the last time you heard from me. Oops. What happened, you ask? Where have I been all this time? I've decided I'm not actually going to go there for now. There's no point really. The exercise of the day is about embracing the future, not the past. Suffice to say that I am celebrating, with much jubilance, the departure of 2010, and I have no immediate need to go back there anytime soon.

Can I get a Wooooooohoooooo??!!! January 5th, 2011. New year. Clean slate. Fresh start. All that jazz. I don't usually get excited about a new year. I usually spend a good 24 hours recovering from the hangover that inevitably follows the 'celebration', and just keep on truckin'. This year, I have decided that there's absolutely no reason not to get excited...shout it out...relish the idea of a new chapter in my life. Truth is, I didn't really celebrate the new year on January 1st. My new year is starting, rather, on the 5th. I've actually been in a bit of a state for the last week, since about Dec. 26th in fact, that one might call a funk. Funk would be a great word for it. I was sitting here today, on the fence about whether to start blah, blah, blogging again, and it dawned on me that this strange but therapeutic form of communication with the cyber universe (in reality, virtually nobody) is/was something that I've always enjoyed. I like to write. Don't care who's reading. So here I am. The old format, that is to say, the newer old format, shall most likely fall to the wayside. Not sure yet. In writing to an audience of none, that's certainly my prerogative (never knew that's how you spell prerogative).

So what's my plan? No idea :) Thought I would start with the idea of a new beginning and go from there. I was taking inventory today of the books on my nightstand. Somewhere down the road I will get to the list, but bear with me here. With the exception of the über-popular Girl With A Dragon Tattoo (quite frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what all the hoopla is about), those books all fall into the fix-yourself category. That said, the sub-categories are incredibly diverse. In any event, it made me think that there are a lot of things I would like to see happen in 2011, improvements in my life and in the lives of the people I love. And why shouldn't 2011 be THE YEAR?

Will come back to all this in a minute. Continuing with today's ponderings... On the other side of my bedroom, in a little sitting area I cherish immensely, I noticed a book that I've probably moved from one place to another three hundred times and never actually opened. It's a book my mom has, a book I bought at a used-book sale, called Simple Abundance, A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. Today, I decided to open it. Who doesn't need a little more comfort and joy in their day, right? How much energy had I spent moving it, whilst not gleaning a damn thing from it? It's one of those books where there's a message/passage for every day of the year. Since it's January 5th already, I had to play catch-up and read the first five. Wow. It turns out it's really good stuff. As the title suggests, simple stuff. Reading those things, in turn, got me thinking about you, my long lost blog, and to make a short story long, that's how I ended up here. Strange, where a day may take you. With regard to my initial proclamation (Born to Woohoo!), I don't think I've ever doubted my tendancy towards all things Woohoo-esque. I have been woohooing since I could walk. The question is, what happens when you put all that woohooing to good use and channel those woo's and hoo's into something worth getting excited about -- your own daily existence.

I will leave you on that note, Dear Blog, in the hopes that I think of you as fondly tomorrow and return for another attempt at examining these thoughts I'm having...the main idea being that my year might just be full of life-changing revelations. Hmmmm....