I’m still here.

You may have thought I vanished, or fell ill, or was kidnapped by wild elementary school teachers.

Nah. I’m still here. But it’s been a rough few months.

Back in April we were surprised to find out that someone was interested in buying my husband’s house. (It wasn’t on the market, not officially.) After a whirlwind of papers (thank you, DocuSign) and a house tour, the buyers made a cash offer we couldn’t refuse.

Two weeks later they backed out. I won’t bore you with details. Yes, it was legal. No, we couldn’t fight it.

In the meantime we had set wheels in motion to move to my house, the one I inherited from my dad. Old limestone and frame farmhouse, sitting on four acres, right on the edge of the teeny town I grew up in. In fact, my ancestors built the house. Both the frame part (now the kitchen, originally a 1-room cabin across the road) and the stone part (from a quarry owned by a family down the road, whose descendants still live there). Anyway . . .

We couldn’t stop the wheels once they began turning. We were going to move.

And it got hairy. It’s still hairy, but we’re in the house, and we have a real bedroom and an actual office (shared space, this time), and our second-oldest kid lives with us. They teach 2nd grade in a town about 45 minutes from here. Together we have four cats (you may have seen me tweet about losing the Old Cat Man a couple of weeks back, just after we moved here) and a dog. It’s a houseful.

And it’s wonderful, honestly.

We’re running a GoFundMe that my husband created, in which he explains some backstory. I’ll share the link here, and then I won’t bring it up again. The donors have gotten us to 70% of our goal, which is mind-blowing to say the least; it only went up on the 11th, and here we are 5 days later at nearly three-quarters raised. WOW.

If you want to donate directly instead of through the GFM, you can do that via http://PayPal.me/KarenConlin

Or, if you’d like to work with me on your book or short story or what have you, and you’d like to put the down payment toward our funding drive, that’s great, too. Details for my services are at my personal page here on the site. I’m happy to take an amount as a down payment and work out the details later (like the actual word count, a calendar slot, and so on).

If you just want to share the link, that’s fantastic too. Sharing is free. Sometimes that’s what we can afford to do.

Thank you all for reading. I’m planning to be around more now that things are settling down a bit.

Oh, here’s that link: https://gofund.me/a73badcf

Thanks, everyone.