What fresh hell is this?

Once upon a time, I was a blogger.  If you go into the WayBack Machine and look for snowballinhell.net from 2003 through 2007, you'll find samples of some of my old posts.  I was blogging about my court/custody battles with my ex-husband, being a single working mom, and posting pictures of my knitting.  I was also working at a job I loved.  I had a small but deeply disturbed following of friends, fellow bloggers, and random people who stumbled across me on the internet.  If you knew me then, please say hi by one method or another.  If you know my real identity, please continue to keep it secret because I'm still massively paranoid.  Some things never change, do they?

So what am I doing here?  Great question, and one I've been trying to figure out my entire life. I guess what I'm doing here is exactly that.  I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing here.  I'm also trying to figure out a way to write this re-introductory post without sounding like one of those tacky annual Christmas letters you get from relatives who only contact you to impress you with the knowledge that they had the foresight to take a Santa hat for each member of the family when they went to the Bahamas so that they could put that photo on the card.

I used to spend a lot of time bitching blogging about my ex-husband and the crappy ways in which he manipulated our son, who was in elementary school at the time.  That kid (known only as B for Boy here in the blog world) is now a sophomore in high school trying to pass math so that he can get the good student insurance discount and get his driver's license.  His much older sister (known as G, obviously enough) is in a master's program at an expensive private university for Buddhists and beat poets.  (Yes, you and Google can probably figure that one out without much help.)  It wasn't anywhere near the places I thought she'd be going with her life and it's still baffling me a bit.  You'll see posts about that, I'm sure.

While I will probably still throw out the infrequent rant about X and his Evil Minion, he's causing far fewer issues these days.  Not that he's given up being a pain in the ass.  It's just that B is old enough to make his own decisions regarding visitation, and there's very little of it these days.

I remarried about three years ago, so there's a new husband who will probably provide plenty of blog fodder because all relationships can be difficult to navigate, and I'm a well documented failure at marriage.  In general, he's a Really Great Guy, but don't be surprised if you hear something about him from time to time.  That's also why I won't blog about my job.  I semi-loathe my job.  But I desperately need said job to pay bills, so there will be very little bitching about work here even though it is an untapped diamond mine of gems for blogging.

I'm very politically opinionated, although I am certainly not a political blogger. If I begin to discuss anything political, you will notice that my left knee begins to jerk and my heart begins to bleed.  I am a liberal.  Feel free to disagree with me, but remember that I am also the totalitarian queen of my own blog and might delete your right-wing crap in the comments section if I find is particularly intrusive.

You probably won't see much knitting anymore.  Oh, I still knit.  Just not nearly as frequently as I used to.  Yes, I do miss it, but I have less control over certain activities than I used to.  Knitting is just one of them.  You see, I began struggling with some health weirdness a while back and a misdiagnosis (thank you LabCorp, you idiots) turned out to be rheumatoid arthritis.  It sucks more than you can possibly realize unless you've got it.  There are some tremendous blogs out there that cover RA far better than I could ever hope to.  I'm not here to inform you about the disease or even crusade for more awareness, although that's an excellent thing.  I'm here to bitch about my personal experience with RA, and I will probably do a lot of it!  No, it's not a fatal disease, but it's chronic and I'm finding out just what that really means.

As a warning, I do not seek advice!  No, my self-absorbed attention whoring here is entirely for my own benefit.  If it entertains you or informs you, that's really great and I'm truly thrilled. I've made some great friends by blogging in the past and hope to make more.