Dear friends, I have been home for two days, and I have had stories to tell, but alas, Real Life keeps intruding on my storytelling time with a vengeance. I will not bore you with excuses, at least not yet. I will just have to save them -- the stories, not the excuses -- for tomorrow night, after I return from Spin Out, the spinning/knitting party/Heifer International benefit at the Cherry Tree Fountain in Central Park, engineered by the beautiful and awe-inspiring Cara. The weather forecast for tomorrow is pretty dire -- thunderstorms, flash flood warnings -- but I'll be damned if a little thunder will keep an army of spinners away. 
In my defense, I will say that I did have something nifty planned for tonight. Originally I'd planned to post my Tales Out of Estes last night. Merrily I skipped hither and yon about the internets, collecting the URLs of all the delightful new friends I made over the weekend. Of course, I couldn't just collect those URLs without reading everyone's travelogues and looking at their pictures. Oh, look, I said to myself. That dowdy, lumpy old woman is wearing a shawl just like the one Snow knitted for me. And look! She's wearing a baseball shirt just like mine!
It took about seven seconds for the awful truth to descend upon my consciousness. Let's just say that I don't respond well to photographs, and spent the better part of four hours torturing Lloyd, my mother, and no fewer than three friends with my wails and moans about what a frumpy old misery I had turned into, and how said frumpy old misery in the photos bore no resemblance whatsoever to the new wave intellectual sex pixie that ruled my soul. It was hideous. Sorry, Lloyd. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, everyone unlucky enough to talk to me in the past 24 hours.
'mouse somehow managed to convince me -- don't ask me how -- that the cure for what ailed me would be to a) sing to him, and b) post it as an Audblog post. It only took me three hours and a strong coffee to give me the nerve to take him up on it, singing from the They Might Be Giants catalogue into the phone while Lloyd watched Scully scold Mulder in the next room. Now if only Audblog and TypePad would play nicely with each other and get the damn thing up, then we'd be laughing. As would you, no doubt. 
Tomorrow, dear friends, I promise.