Hmmm. Where to Start?

It has been years since I have blogged. Literally. Years. (Eighteen months, to be exact.) So what brings me here now?

Phew. Where to begin?

To be honest, I came here to cannibalize, or at least, to glean from past posts. You see, as I posted back in 2014, I returned to school at the University of Houston. My goal was to complete the BA that I walked away from in 1985 when Tim and I married. Ultimately I wanted to apply to an MFA program to take the writing that so satisfied me here in this blog, and hone it, polish it, take it to the next level. You can't get a master's degree without a bachelor's degree, so the BA had to be the first stop. Let me tell you, it has been one wild and crazy stop! As it just so happens (like anything just happens) the University of Houston has a nationally recognized graduate creative writing program. A program that includes the phenomenal faculty teaching at the undergraduate level. So while I have been finishing up that degree, I have been able to sit at the feet, if you will, of the very same caliber of instructors that I thought I would have to wait until graduate school to study under.

I have won writing contests. (You can read about it here, including the actual winning piece.)

I have been published.

I have been able to serve as editor for the undergraduate literary magazine, Glass Mountain.

I graduate in May, and have just days ago clicked "submit" on the last of those graduate school applications. Those programs that have astonishingly high acceptance rates, such as 2%, or even... .5% That is point five percent. As in half a percent. Yikes! Contrast that to one five year PhD program that I looked into that warned of accepting only 6-8 students out of 150 applicants. I cocked my head and thought "Dang, that's a great acceptance rate!" If I keep up with thinking like that, I might start investing in Powerball, or even run in a marathon...

Part of that degree that I will earn, come May, is a senior honors thesis. Guess what I am writing my thesis about? This may come as a shock, but I opted to do my thesis on...farming. More specifically, our farm memoir. After all, why waste the years spent suffering researching? As I drew up the outline for the farm memoir, it occurred to me that coming back to the old home place and poking around in the dusty closets of the blog might yield some long forgotten nightmare memory that might work well in a farm memoir/thesis/exposition.

So here I am.

Is anyone else here?

At any rate it has been fun to write just for, well, the relaxation and joy of it, instead of for a grade.

Maybe I'll see you around sometime. And fill you in on the kids who have grown up and moved out, the farmers markets started, the kids who have gotten married...

In the meanwhile, see ya at the market!