While away, I did not while away the months since January.  My life has been in turmoil.

Immediate and important matters come first: My condolences and well wishes to all who knew Caine, to her co-bloggers, to her family, to other bloggers here, to readers and commenters.  I apologize for not being around as events happened.  It’s highly unlikely I could have done anything to help, but I should have been around to offer commiserations and kindness.

Those who remember that I live in Taiwan may have wondered about the recent news of a murder in Taipei.  This is not the first time I’ve been in close proximity to a murder (*), but it is the first time I’ve had mutual acquaintances with the accused murderers, people whom I no longer consider “friends”.

(* I worked as a security guard when I was in college in the early 1990s.  A co-worker was stabbed and murdered at a motel that employed our company, a place I had worked from time to time.  Other hotels and the local Greyhound station regularly had violent ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands attempting to find women who tried to get away.)

Oddly, it’s not the murder and those involved that worry me, it’s other people and other issues I’ll talk about in other posts.  I won’t be offering any opinion on the murders, only reporting news items because I have in the past associated this blog with my facebook page (though not vice versa) and someone may be able to connect them.

I’m restricting my social life for the next few months for personal and safety reasons which will give me a lot more time to write.  Whether I will maintain the discipline to do so remains to be seen.  Please prod me so that I do.

A final note: A thank you to PZ Myers and others who maintain Freethought Blogs for not closing and removing this blog.  In all honesty, I thought they would have, I was expecting to return only as a commenter.  I had suggested in the past to close down blogs that were inactive for six months, and I’ve been away for eight.