I have returned!

Let me tell you, it was something to be sitting in Grandma and Grandpa Casey's Dad's living room watching all the blizzard coverage in the cool Florida evening. It's the second time I've missed a Major Snow Event while on vaca in a warm clime. The other was spring break '98 when we were in Puerto Vallarta and it snowed so much in Chicago and South Bend that I-90 was closed. And, just like that trip, by the time we returned, the roads were clear and much of the snow had melted away in the rain. It still meant piles of snow in parking lots and on the grass (there's still several feet on our front lawn), but no shoveling to do. In fact, Cranky Old Man even had our half of the driveway snowblowed, though he told me this morning he didn't want to get too close to Casey's car because if the alarm went off, who would shut it off?

And last night, while taking the first of our things in from my car, just after Casey warned me of the sheet of ice on the front sidewalk, I navigated it carefully but erroneously thought I was clear of it when ��WHAM! � my feet went out from under me and I landed hard on my left elbow. Luckily, my elbow landed on the half-gallon of milk Mom had bought for us and I didn't break anything. Except the milk, because in moments, a white flood was moving toward me and I had to scramble to get up on the ice and avoid the milkflow. Also to our benefit, Mom went ahead and bought us not only a half-gallon of skim but also a half-gallon of Farmland Dairies' Skim Plus, which we were able to use for the Annie's mac & cheese we had been planning for dinner.

OK, enough of that. I've already gone through my work e-mail, but I've still got 40 Hotmail messages in my good account and who knows how many in my spam account, plus all your diaries to read, plus the account of the vacation to type in and post. And Gary and I have eight Simpsons trivia questions on my day-by-day calendar to go through. Despite my voice mail message saying I would be out of the office until today, I also still got two messages � one from an angry reader about our coverage of a certain popular singer who is sometimes considered royalty and one from a PR flack in LA who doesn't listen.

And for any of you who put forth the effort to keep reading while I was away, I thank you. Not only did my daily hits stay in double digits, the lowest figures were 26 and 27, and those just in the last two days. On top of that, my average daily readership is now up to 30.

I'm such a whore.