Just came from the doctor. He wants me to get a second opinion. Which is strange because his first opinion was, "I'm sure there's nothing wrong. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about."

Have I given you sufficient time to marvel at my blogging restraint? Well, shockingly, it hasn't been that much of a challenge to stay away since last we spoke. I've been a wee bit preoccupied with getting this website up and going, filling my online stores with attractive quality merchandise - *cough buy something cough* - and creating not one...

...not two...

...but three...

...new digital painterly pieces for you to enjoy. Plus, I've also been working on the sketch for my next digital painting of a ship's figurehead, tentatively titled "Bow Maiden."

So, you can see that I have not been sitting around just twiddling my thumbs. No, I've been sitting around and putting my thumbs to an inordinate amount of work that, having very little experience with twiddling of any kind to draw from, I can only assume is "more than" that.

And with this added burden placed on not just the thumbs, but on every single digit of both of my two hands (the right AND the left!) I'm afraid I have determined an unsettling truth...

My left hand is, how shall I say, subpar.

That's fancy English for "a big dumb lump of useless flesh." 

Well, I guess that's not really fair. I mean, it has its uses. But it is in the unenviable position, naturally, of being compared to the go-getter that is my right hand. I mean that guy is a champ! He's in the game, under the lights, scoring touchdowns, and my left hand...

Well, Lefty is watching moths and getting beaned by pigskin. Every. Time.

I've been uploading a slew of cool new products into my Zazzle store this past week, and the process requires a lot of repetitive typing of one sentence for every product: "Featuring original artwork titled "_____" by April Moen."

In the beginning, all was well... 

But then...

It only got worse...

Leaving me with only one possible conclusion...

You're drunk, Lefty. Go home.

I suppose this was inevitable. Me, starting a blog. Again.

I had another blog once. It was a good blog. An awesome blog. A blog to end all blogs. But it didn't. End all blogs, that is. There are still one or two floating around the recesses of the worldwide webs. You can probably find them if you look really hard.

But my blog was fun. And poorly designed. And it even had music blaring from the bottom of the scroll-heavy pages. (Hey, it was 2007. It was a different time back then, man.) People hated that, but they kept coming back. By the hundreds every day. 

Even more when I got rid of the music player.

But then life happened. And more life happened. And I realized what a time-suck that blogging had become. And how often my automatic response to the coolest or most significant moments of my life was, "That will make good blog fodder." And how seldom I was truly living in the moment with the people that I loved as a result.

So I stopped. Cold turkey. One day I was a blogger, and the next...

I didn't know what I was.

I just knew what I wasn't.

I wasn't a 'stay-up-'til-three-in-the-morning-to-finish-this-post' girl. Or a 'not-now-honey-I-gotta-return-these-comments' wife. Or a 'quit-your-crying-and-put-on-this-goofy-hat-so-I-can-post-your-embarrassing-pic-to-the-blogosphere-to-the-praise-and-adulation-of-my-many-nameless-faceless-admirers-and-to-your-eternal-unending-and-possibly-debilitating-shame' mom.

God willing, I will never be that again.

But I do miss writing. And sharing stories about life in all its minutiae. And saying snarky things that make people laugh. And having a voice, separate and distinct, even if I'm only using it to shout into the void from this little tiny iceberg of bandwidth that I call my own. 

And so I'm here, giving this another shot, and praying for the strength to resist the temptation to overindulge in this good thing. 

In all things, moderation, I tell myself. You can do this.

Baby steps.

Thing is, I've never been a baby steps kind of girl. My motto? If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. Twice.

So, this shall be an adventure for both of us. The thrill ride that is restrained casual blogging. 

Do you think you can handle that kind of excitement?

Well, then, let the adventure begin!