Hello Out There!

Swallow-tailed kites above our pond two weeks ago.

Hello blog reading friends! I just wanted to pop in and say that yes, I am still alive but to state the obvious: blogging here has fallen off a cliff. It’s been an issue for several years now and I’ve tried to reinvent something here a couple of times but have failed to make it stick. I’m less inclined to write as openly as I used to, though I have pillaged these digital pages for info I’ve written many, many times for a variety of reasons and have always been glad to have access to it.

If by chance you tried to visit (unlikely) in the last week or two you might have seen that my account was suspended by GoDaddy. Chris forwarded me the email he’d received and it seems one of my plugins, Updraft, was causing some issues. Updraft is a website backup plugin that I had used for years but it seems recent updates had caused some issues with GoDaddy and also it was backing up locally onto GoDaddy’s servers instead of to DropBox and causing my account to go over the allotted access that I pay for. Before I really knew what was going on I contemplated if I really cared if my website went *poof* and 20+ years of writing disappeared. 90% of me was at peace with letting it all go but 10% of me was going to wish I had access/properly downloaded all of my AT and FT hiking posts as well as all of my posts written about Forest when he was a baby and toddler. I could let the rest go. Which tells me a lot about what I need to do here in the next few months. Anyway, I resolved that issue after talking to GoDaddy and we’re up and running again!

Something else that I realized last fall that was beneficial were all of my general hiking posts. I did some physical therapy last fall for plantar fasciitis (still not totally resolved, thanks perimenopause) and as I was talking to some of the assistants there about hiking they asked about places to hike. I told one of them about a location in Sam Houston NF and a few sessions later he told me he’d gone to look it up and found my blog posts! So, this blog is helpful in that aspect.

Things I will likely be doing in the near future:

• Turning off commenting–still debating but good chance. Comments have always been rare here anyway.
• Reformatting for more specific writing
• Design overhaul
• Archiving posts

I am still writing semi-regularly at my On Texas Nature Substack and will begin cross-posting those here, too, as a backup for any glitches on Substack in the future. I miss the openness of writing on the internet before everyone was on the internet and I could feel like I was sharing with some nameless, faceless friends—some who I’ve become IRL friends with!!!—but everything is so much more searchable these days. Last week I was perusing those people-finder websites that outs everyone with where they live and who they live with—I’ve found myself on them before. Most of that is public information like a phone book used to be so it didn’t bother me so much but apparently now those sites are scraping LinkedIn because my entire job history was listed on one of them. My LinkedIn was not set to public. I ended up going in and deleting all of my information and left the profile up so I could still connect with former colleagues, but that was just a bridge too far.

So, I’m here but I’m gonna batten down the hatches a bit and reformat soon!