Fannie Mae and the Vicar

First, apologies for this post. The title "Fannie Mae and the Vicar" deserves better than this middling effort.

Second, apologies for my absence. Apparently, I'm slowly and cautiously returning from an unplanned three-month-long blog sabbatical. I'll ultimately take responsibility for my lapse, but I'd like to start off by blaming others.

My sabbatical started in March. It turns out that Fannie Mae, she's no lady. In fact, she's a multi-billion dollar company you may have read about in the news. It's not easy to go a less publicly popular company than AOL, but some credible data says that I did. People get really judgmental about about billion-dollar bailouts.

I'm enjoying this part-time job -- the people are great and the work is interesting -- but it's consuming a lot of my time and almost all of my creative energy. It's just like the song says, "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to promote liquidity in the secondary mortgage market."

So first, I blame my blog dearth on Fannie.

Secondly, I'd like to blame God.

OK, that was just for dramatic effect (let's hold off on the lightning strike for now.) To be more precise, I am on a church committee to select our new priest, or "vicar."

[As a side note, one of the best parts of being Episcopalian is the terminology. Does your church have a "vicar?" How about "verger?" "Acolyte?" As a convert, I quickly learned to play it cool and ask, for example, "Where is the narthex," rather than "What the deuce IS a narthex" so I appear to be simply lost, rather than ignorant.]

But I digress. I'm happy to be part of what SJ calls the "That's the Spot, Vicar" Committee, but being a Vicar Picker has turned out to be a significant time commitment, requiring up to three meetings a week. Tomorrow I'll be driving seven hours with the committee to check out a candidate. (I'm hoping that the candidate will ride in my van so that I can finally use the phrase "vicar picker upper;" fingers crossed!) Luckily we are close to a decision, and my work there will soon be done.

Now I should step up and admit that part of the reason for my absence was my own fault; I was feeling uninspired. I felt bloggishly spent, and wasn't sure that I had anything interesting to say. I even tried to write a few posts and decided that they weren't worth publishing.

Recently, though, things have been looking up. I've collected several ideas that I'd like to discuss (Sarah Ferguson, my trip to France, my triathlon, and of course, Al and Tipper: RIP/WTF?!!). Also, I've remembered that my quality bar was never that high, so I might as well jump back in.

So I'm back. And especially to those who have been annoyingly increasingly on my back to write something -- you know who you are! -- thanks for noticing that I was gone and encouraging me to write again. You guys are why a blog beats the heck out of a diary. :)