Hiatus is over!... a Merry Christmas!

The wait is over. Thank my Wonderful Wife. I am back and I am determined to stick to it and keep up with writing on a regular basis.
For those of you who were avid readers (as Stephen King would call you), I apologize for abandoning you to read over and over the same unfulfilled promise of my return. This has been long overdue. A few of you had mentioned to me that you missed reading these posts, but I just shrugged the encouragement off as polite courtesy. I apologize for not allowing myself to hear you.
I have thought about coming back often, but i just have never made the time. Not an excuse, just the truth.
I got promoted recently at work and my available brainstorming and subsequent writing time was reduced to the hour at night I would spend unwinding to a video game after the rest of the family was safely tucked in to bed. Not an excuse, just the facts.
There are even a few posts that I started last summer that were decent beginnings that I just couldn't seem to finish -- perhaps I was struck with a bit of writers block. Not an excuse, just a dose of reality.
Anyway you look at it, I wasn't coming back on my own. Not without help. Again, you can thank my Wonderful Wife.
She might be the most ingenious person I know. A few times in passing, she mentioned that I should get back to writing, that I enjoyed it so much; that she enjoyed it so much. Yeah, yeah, I thought, she is so sweet to say things like that. I didn't "get it" until she showed me how important this blog was to her in an unexpected and inventive way.
Over the course of the past week, in preparation for her very personal Christmas gift to me, my Wonderful Wife spent many hours selecting, cutting, pasting, organizing, printing, binding, and essentially publishing the entirety of this blog (yes, word for word, all of your comments were preserved). She says it was to ensure that the writing wasn't lost forever in the vacuum of the Internet. What she meant to show me was the actual weight of the work that I had created in a way that forced me to finally realized the value.
I couldn't imagine that I had actually written that much until it was presented to me, boxed and bound. The volume of words was one thing, but the real value of them registered as her father read through the beginining pages, laughing all the while. He'd look up at me shaking his head and smiling, immediately returning his eyes to the paper once he knew I was able to recognize the pleasure he was having reading my writing.
I don't mean to over dramatize this whole thing, (too late) but it turns out that several others were taking this blog more seriously than I. I had started to take this all for granted: the blog, the entries, the ideas, the opinions, the readers. I started to write and then quit once I felt satisfied, never finishing what I had started. I owe it to any faithful reader to continue. And with all the effort I had been putting into the writing, especially knowing how much I love to write, I owe it to myself to continue.
So here I go.
I'll have to start slow.
Writing is a bit like running; you get better and faster the more you do it, and until you are back in shape, you have to take frequent breaks.
I'll try to keep the breaks short.