It’s a strange phenomenon, really, to have a blog for four-and-a-half years, never even bother with an “About” page, and then realize once you do bother with an “About” page that you’re completely tongue-tied and shy about it all. Which is ridiculous, considering some of the ground I’ve covered here, lo! these many years now. Nevertheless, that’s the position in which I find myself, blushing and hesitant, like a bride suddenly modest after the wedding night.

It’s weird.

Uhm. Let’s see. Perhaps to start, I should just try to make this page useful to new readers. So to help you in reading the blog, here are some definitions of terms and identification of people who appear on this blog:

~ MB: My Beloved, my husband. Everyone around here now calls him MB which I think is rather sweet.

~ Piper/The Peep: Adorable niece, my sister’s youngest kid.

~ The Banshee: My brother’s oldest daughter, my niece.

~ Baby Banshee: Her little sister.

~ Tee Tee: The name Piper started to call me because she couldn’t pronounce “Aunt Tracey.” It just stuck. Now The Banshees use it, too.

~ The word pippa: Uh, well, it means “people” and I think I stole it from one hapless auditioner on “American Idol” who inexplicably auditioned with “Go Down, Moses” (really, dude?) singing “Let my pippa go … let my pippppa go …….” Somehow, it stuck. My peeps are now “pippa.”

~ We do not have children and it has forever changed me. There’s an infertility category in the side bar, for the interested or similarly hurting.

~ I’ve lost family members to terrorism. There’s a category in the sidebar about that topic as well called “that plane crash.” I don’t openly name the event on the blog because it’s too Google-able and in the past, it brought people of ….. strange sensibilities out of the woodwork. The posts are password protected, for various reasons. If you’re interested in the password, please email me and please be polite. Simply using the “please” and “thank you” we all learned as kids makes a HUGE difference in my willingness to give that information out to you. Just sayin’ is all. I’ve had people with, well, too much perverse curiosity and minimal social skills simply DEMAND the password from me. Doesn’t exactly bewitch me, you know?

~ I’m a Christian and I realize that might be a dealbreaker for some people. It’s kind of a dealbreaker for me, which doesn’t make sense to some, I suppose. I don’t try to characterize myself as someone who knows it all or has it all figured out — because I absolutely don’t — nor do I ever characterize the Christian life as some kind of perky Disneyland. It’s not. I’ve known plenty of Christians — good, bad, and ugly, so I get that lots of people don’t like Christians. I don’t like them sometimes either.

~ Sometimes the blog is lighthearted, sometimes completely silly, sometimes serious. It just runs the gamut here and I like it that way. I run the gamut, I guess, so I write about whatever strikes my fancy in the moment.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope you stick around.