231 weeks. Holy crap.
That's how long it's been since I posted to LiveJournal.  You know how long 231 weeks is?  The LiveJournal interface and look has completely changed.  It's long enough for me to forget I even had a LiveJournal.  Long enough for everything to change.  The MrJames who started this journal (If we may be so lax as to apply that name to it) is dead now.  Mourn him but briefly, for a new, allegedly improved MrJames has risen from the ashes.  I'm living a new life, in a new state, in a new career.  Without a family of my own anymore, but with my sisters nearby for the fist time in, well, ever.

So.  Four years.  Okay, to sum up my life for the last four years....

Had another granddaughter - Chloe Mae Ward.  She's adorable, and just a teensy bit evil.

Quit my job at the diner.  Started managing the kitchen at a local bar.  Much better crowd to work with, and for. 

Split from my wife.  She'd been having an affair.  No, that sounds too serious.  "Affair" implies a relationship, and my Jacklyn had better standards than to become romantic with that schlub.  They were just screwing around.  Still.  That was enough.

Spent a year being really depressed.  Marci and Dave took me in, and gave me a safe place to heal, for which I will never be able to thank them enough or repay them.  I spent some time being angry at Marci, too.  Had she not intervened, I would have gone on blissfully ignorant of the "dalliance" and maybe the subsequent "rendezvous" that would no doubt have followed.  I would have been a cuckold, and a fool, but I would have been blissfully, happily ignorant.  Except that were I to choose, I would rather have real heartache than happy lies, because apparently I have this masochistic streak in me.  She was right, and it just took me a while to figure that out.  In the meantime, I started drinking more than I should.  I worked at a BAR, and hell.  Not like I had a house payment to worry about.  Bad move, man.

In a clerical error involving my evil twin, my car got stolen by my bank.  No kidding.  Those heartless bastards.  It being the last of the last straws I was going to take, I made plans to depart Michigan. I needed a change of scene, something, anything.

I moved here to Corvallis, Oregon.  Got an apartment with my youngest sister, Sarah, the photographer.  The elder of the two, Kaci, is an entomologist.  Fancy way of saying bug specialist.  Some people kill spiders.  Some people toss them outside.  Kaci classifies them by genus and species and comments on how pretty they are.  For the record, I kill them.

Missed the birth of a third granddaughter, Abbigail Christine Densmore.  That hurt.  A lot.  Wanna hold the grandbaby.  Wanna read to Chloe.  Wanna take Melodie to festivals and have her tell me stories again.  I couldn't stay, though.  Being so close, but not being ...  I couldn't stay.  Let's leave it at that.  It was killing me.

So yeah, Oregon.  This is Eden.  Land of Milk and Honey, and a bag of chips.

Good move, man.  I suggest everyone in Michigan depart.  Compared to the soul-numbing pit of despair and hypocrisy and economic descent that is Michigan - now with extra winter - a new life in Chernobyl would look good.

Now I'm working at Conifer House, an Assisted Living Facility (place where they put people to wait for them to die) and at a Community College (place where they put people to learn how to live).  The contrast is amusing.  And I think I'm ready to go back to writing.  Finally.

It's been too bloody long.

Brace yourselves, pages.   MrJames has returned.