Oh, it’s you. Well, hi there.

I like to think that a good blog is kind of like a solid marriage. You can take the occasional separate vacation, then pick up right where you left off. After weeks of no posting, that’s a comforting thought.

(of course there is another way of looking at this: that a bad blog is like a bad marriage: no communication whatsoever. But I’d prefer that we stick with the first metaphor, if that’s alright).

Been gone for a little while. Nothing worrisome, just dizzying. Swamped with blah, blah, blahbity-blah, we’ve all got deadlines and flurries of emails, phone calls and projects, and there is nothing particularly interesting about mine. Except, of course, to me, but only because it’s mine.

Somewhere in these weeks, I dreamed that Mike Tyson was standing on my chest and I couldn’t breathe. He was a mean, nasty fellow in my dream; he knew he was hurting me, and he was glad. Around the same time, I also dreamed that I was trying to catch white rats that were scurrying away from me down a long, dark corridor. They weren’t especially mean or nasty, they were just rats. But still.

Those were the less-pleasant dreams. I also dreamed about eating Thin Mints.

I wrote a bunch of sentences like this one:

The masses of ordinary particles within the electroweak scale appear almost negligible compared to the Planck mass. The reasons for this are unknown, and explanations almost always predict new physics, extensions of the Standard Model, that might be seen in the high energy collisions of the LHC.

Readers Rosemary and Miranda and TC know what this means. Me? I still can’t tell my W bosons from my Z bosons, but that’s a different story. I also wrote some other stuff; one piece, quite different from the above, involved copious amounts of chicken puns.  There was a fundraiser in there, too; great organization, great night, but it was much harder this year than it’s been in the past, and we made less money.

That, as they say, is the hallmark of hard times: working harder than ever to slide backwards.

And when it was all done, when I found that Mike Tyson had stepped off of my chest and let me take a deep breath, I took myself out for a day of mid-week skiing. Skiing is like knitting for me; I’m learning, awkwardly, when I have time and a little bit of patience with myself. I had a great day, fully out of cell range, and then I discovered in the late-afternoon that Merrie’s school had had a half-day and she’d been in someone else’s care for hours. Parenting: not for the half-assed, it turns out.

But that’s all my blah blah blahbity blah. The world at large was a little more interesting than all of that. In one stunning piece of medical news, there was maybe, just maybe, some progress in making people un-allergic to peanuts, a report that made me say “NO. WAY.” in the car as I was driving, prompting little Charlotte to repeat after me, “No way no way no way no way” for the next few minutes in her elf-like singsong voice. I found it kind of stunning, this idea that you could un-allergize someone. And I’m still not ready for you to try it at home with your peanut-allergic kids. But still, it’s a story worth watching.

And, hey, the Obamas decided to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn — the first time there’s been such a thing since 1943, when Elanor Roosevelt planted a victory garden. Michelle herself was seen scooping fresh organic meals at a D.C. soup kitchen, then later I got to interview the head of that soup kitchen, whom it turns out I went to college with, though we did not know each other then.

Oh, and bills were introduced to Congress that would ban bisphenol A here at home (remember that my handsome Canadian boyfriend banned it long ago in our neighbor to the north), which is an exciting development for babies and other people with endocrine systems.

Oh, yeah, and the economy got so bad that this year’s Tupperware party now has a “hock your jewelry” theme. Incredible. And yet the opportunist in me makes me wish I’d thought of that idea first.

And that’s just for starters. But tonight, like a partner in a good marriage (or a bad one) I figured it was time to come home, check in, spend a little time together. Maybe even snuggle a tiny little bit.

Consider yourself snuggled, friends. It’s nice to be back.