Whoosh! And suddenly, the first two months of the year are gone. Before we know it, our park will look like that photo again, instead of brown and gray and wet.

The world hasn’t ended. Life hasn’t been whirlwind crazy. We haven’t run away to live in a yurt on a mountainside in Nepal.

The first two months of 2012 have been filled with the trials and excitement of a perfectly ordinary domestic life — “Would you please scoop the cat litter already?” and “Could you hang up your towels, please?” and “Wait, you made brownies?!” We wake up and get ready for work and go to the gym (her) and take hula hooping classes (me) and drink to much caffeine (me) and read to the point of nausea (her) and work rewardingly long hours and take walks around the city and occasionally spend time with our friends — but that last is only if it’s a weekend, and if we don’t have work to do, and if the laundry is already done. Because even on a weekend, one or the either of us gets grumpy if we stay up past bed time.

Truthfully, there just hasn’t been much worth writing about — except for the kitten tales, because Miranda and Stumpy Freedom are adorable, and insist on reminding us of that every five minutes.

Of course, none of that holds a drop of water if you follow me on Twitter, where in the last two days I’ve been actively cataloguing the construction on the building across the street from my office, having conversations about the potential value of ACH to nonprofit organizations with primarily US-donors, squee-ed about J.K. Rowling’s new book and Stephen Sondheim’s new musical, shared the new SankyNet newsletter and a chilling infographic about the perception of trustworthiness for news sources, and realized that in two months I’ll reach the Hobbity age of majority. (I’m thinking about throwing a picnic party with Levain’s cookies and Bag-End seed cake and fireworks to celebrate. If you know of any good dragons who could get the flames going, please point them in my direction.)

I can’t get over the oddness of realizing that I have a great deal to say in tiny snippets of 140 characters, and yet feel that writing a full paragraph for the blog seems overwhelming. It’s similar to my commentary from two weekends ago, puzzling over the pros and cons of deleting my Facebook account — I feel so much more connected to the people I love best when I connect over newsy emails and long telephone calls or comment threads on blogs than through the damned “like” button on Facebook. How can Twitter — which I so often use professionally and yet is still very full of knitterly notes and Jane Austen-ish things and Romanticism — not consume my energy for personal story-telling? This is a very bizarre question to be unable to answer, considering that one of my professional roles is Social Media Strategist (TM?).

While I ponder that in the back of my mind, I’ll use the front of it to tell a story.

President Obama is visiting NYC tonight for a series of campaign fundraising events near Union Square. As such, most of the East Side and midtown were shut down and the evening commute home was predicted to be heinous for most New Yorkers. To bypass the traffic, I walked from my office at 45th and 11th up to Columbus Circle to catch an UWS-bound subway — and was far from the only person with this plan!

As I wandered through the crowds and wove through the grid, I found myself turning left onto 10th Avenue at 49th Street and looking into the lobby of the Skyline Hotel, where Mom and Dad and I stayed on the crazy weekend when we came to town to neighborhood-shop, when I first realized I’d be moving to NYC — and before I was happy about it. There were a few people waiting at the check-in desk as I walked past, with a mountain of bags, each one of a size indicating that they hadn’t anticipated dragging them through the city streets.

I’m generally amused to see tourists coping with New York — unless it’s 8:20 in the morning and they’re standing between me and Starbucks and the office, and which point I want to scream and shove people out of my way. But when I have the time and the degree of calm needed to appreciate witnessing someone else’s adventure, it’s quite wonderful to see someone learn for the first time how tall a skyscraper is when it’s looming immediately over her head, and how fast 20 mph actually is when a car is zooming around a curb less than a foot from your toes. Tonight’s glimpse was one of the fun ones.

So, here’s to telling more silly little stories. And less flaking out.