Hello, again.

The days of overnight shoots and overloaded work madness seem to be over for a while.

Now, on to the new madness: a new home. Yep, for those of you who know me, I'm moving again. Hopefully, though, this will be the last time for a while. It's a lovely place, and very close to Conor's school. I'm downsizing our lives . . . smaller, more-efficient car, single-story home, low-maintenance yard, and a lot less CRAP in the house.

How we accumulated two stories' worth of that much shit, I'll never know.

The world seems to have passed by in the meantime. Not just passed, I guess, but rocketed. And the more wild things are "out there," the more I want to hunker down with a supply of red wine and beef jerky. Every morning, I wake to the news. In those half-sleep, snooze-button excerpts I'll catch blurbs that, inevitably, I wish I hadn't heard.

This morning, for instance, the radio came on and the news of Hizbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers was top story. I cracked an eye open and saw a stripe of livid orange sunlight on my bedroom wall. This wasn't a normal sunrise, because our valley has been blanketed with a smoky, burnt haze from the San Bernardino forest fires. So daylight here is extra-bright, extra-lurid, and terrifically unkind. This is the kind of sun you'd imagine over battlefields. I imagined that would be the same sun that's too familiar in other parts of the world -- sun that pounds through the smoke caused by gunfire and RPGs and roadside bombs and grenades.

It took three hours before I could shake that apocalyptic feeling.

There is something else going on with me, something physical, but I'm not sure I want to write about it. Maybe I will . . . but maybe that's just putting far too much of myself out there.

In the meantime, I look forward to our new home. There's something so exciting about making a fresh start. We'll be moved in just before the boy's 8th birthday. Just before he starts third grade. And I'll be that much further down the road, away from the things that are haunting me.

The better days are ahead, I know.

And thank you, those who visit here and encourage me. I'm trying to re-engage. Thank you for still being around.