What's going on with Lynn?

Hey, guys. I'm sure a few of you are wondering, what the heck's going on with Lynn? A few things.

I've been working on a non-TNH project under my pen name. That's taken a lot of my time, but creatively it has been incredibly satisfying. Some time soon I hope to tell you about it in more detail.

We also completed the sale of our lot, and had to clean it out and get some of our home improvement projects underway (starting with paying off all of our debt including the mortgage). I miss my chickens but other than that? No regrets.

And I've recently been diagnosed with bipolar II. This is not the kind where they find you naked at midnight painting the intersection in a glorious mandala (though that does sound fun). This is the kind where you're hyper-creative or just plain hyper, followed by a bout of real depression.

I've been operating under the assumption that I've been chronically depressed for 35 years off and on, but psychiatric research is showing that people with the pattern of depression I have are actually suffering from a less-dramatic form of bipolar than the classic "manic-depression" we all see on the teevee machine. What this has meant for TNH is, I've been grappling with the diagnosis, the last serious bout of depression, and now, new medication that has turned my brain to mush. They promise me that once I stabilize I'll feel a lot better than I did before I went on it, and I see flickers of that.

Looking back over my life, I definitely see the hypomanic periods (the up-cycles of bipolar). This diagnosis explains a great deal of my past behavior in ways that a simple diagnosis of depression did not. I'm grateful for it.

Anyway, as you've probably seen, I'm still working on putting the site back together. I'm working on about five sites whose software has been woefully let to lapse, and bringing them up to current standards has been a pain. But it's been a worthwhile pain. Three of them are client sites (the Hipmama family of sites) and two of them are mine--this one and Oregon Media Insiders. I'm not done yet, but it's coming along.

Thanks for your patience, the few of you who still read this site to read me.