First Entry

As many of you have noticed, our blogs or journals have been out of touch or unavailable about a month. I think my last entry on our old system was Sept 4, 2007 when I reported the passing of our old dog Kane. Within a day or two of that post we were no longer able to access our website or blogs. It took our Webmaster, Jenny Mauro Hicks a few days to figure out the problem and it was a huge problem, not just for us, but probably thousands of people.

Jenny had purchased server space for our website through a hosting company or broker called Jatol, who buys server space in bulk and passes the savings on in marketing to web designers like Jenny. Anyway, the fellow who owns Jatol hadn't paid his bill with the server for several months, and then he just disappeared, presumably with all the funds he had been paid by people like Jenny over the last several months. Soon the server shut down all of Jatol's sites, including ours. Many have offered to pay the back rent so to speak to get their websites and blogs back up and running, especially in our case to preserve the history of the last 3 years worth of journals, but the Server wouldn't budge. They had a contract with the owner of Jatol, not with anyone else and didn't want to release any of that information because of liability issues.

Jenny had a back up of our website in general although it was not the latest edition, but she was able to get something back up for us fairly soon after disaster struck. She has actually had things set up for us to start new blogs or journals since about Sept 15, but I have just been too overwhelmed and bummed out about loosing all the past entries to think about starting over, but I guess the time has come.

I actually probably have 75% of all my texts for my old entries in a word processor file as I write most of my entries off line so I have access to a good spell check etc... and then I just copy and paste it into the blog format, so I could rebuild many of my prior entries. I will probably do that with some, but probably not all. If there are any of them that any of you especially want to have access to again, let me know. Poor Joe wrote all of his in the blog format, so he has no back up at all. He posted far more frequently that me, and thus lost a lot more than I did.

I have appreciated hearing from those of you who have noticed our journals being MIA. Its nice to know that there are people out there who read it, and have actually missed it besides me. I am absolutely terrible about organizing photo albums or scrap books as writing about the feelings that accompany those photos was always so important and I just never seemed to figure out how to do it, but this journa/blogl has been what I needed to bring that all together. I have really enjoyed writing it for myself and also for the connection I have felt with so many of you in the process.

Almost everyday I think of things I want to write about and I feel a pang of sadness about this situation, but I guess the only way around it is to get writing again. Hopefully you will hear again from me soon with more of what is going on in my life. This is it for tonight. I will have to tackle this a little bit at a time.