Ms Frizzle

There’s nothing quite like having a decision taken out of your hands, to make it clear what outcome you really want. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you may have read my rather emotional and only-just-conherent editorial, where I let out the stress and worry of a week of cyber gremlins that had me convinced I’d lost this blog – the space where I have shared projects and the joys of raising children and thoughts on life for the last almost-fifteen years.

It’s around this time of year I start wondering if blogging is worth it. The high of Blogtober has worn off. The long winter ahead looms. How much energy do I really have to scream into the void that is the blogosphere in 2023? And yet, I can’t shake the mindset that a project isn’t truly finished until it’s blogged and my thoughts recorded for future me. When my blog had migrated successfully and I could access it once more, all the way back to June 2008, I nearly cried.

Clearly, the blog is important to me.

Step one was getting this site moved – I’m now hosting with SiteGround**, and having accessed both their free and premium support options getting my dramas sorted, I can’t recommend them highly enough. I went from there hours on a chat with GoDaddy, to a ticket system and having issues resolved within 20 minutes with SiteGround. I am also very thankful for all the friends who offered to hook me up with their own web devs and husbands and friends to try and resolve my issues. Once I had that done and cleared off my old server, the process began again for the podcast website, which in the end was reasonably easy, aside from somewhat prematurely deleting the old site, so it’s all currently MIA until the name servers populate accordingly over the next 48 hours. The final step was the site I think is the main cause of the current issues – my lifestyle blog. It’s been a long tedious day of downloading each individual media file and reuploading to the new site, and the amount of headspace these gremlins have consumed over the last week and a half have me feeling all frizzly.

The end is in sight though, and to be honest the hardest part, has been getting back on the horse. After so long writing and sharing here, it suddenly seems scary to open it up, pull up a blank post, and start writing. It’s the vibe of the thing, and the vibe is wrong. I was chatting to a friend this afternoon about it, and mentioned I just need to stop overthinking and throw up something quick and easy just to get the ball rolling. She suggested maybe I needed to lean into the frizzle, to write out a post chatting all about the wild ride of the last ten days.

This blog records my story, and this is part of the story of the blog, and thus all deserves recording. As I type, as each paragraph appears on the screen, I can feel the frizzle starting to calm. The vibe is slowly soothing back into it’s familiar rhythm, not pressing down on my shoulders in negativity each time I think “probably should blog”. The lack of notifications pinging through and making me tense up wondering how the heck I was going to fix all of this.

Like any over-thought exercise, the hardest part is starting. Transfer a website. Download some photos. Open the editor, and just start writing. One word at a time. This morning in my frizzliness, I wasn’t sure it was all really worth it. And here I am, the end of the day, a whole post, working through closing those stress loops.

I’m back. The blog is back. I’m so very pleased by both those statements. And I’m so very pleased for each and every one of you who follows along. It’s a joy to have you here, and I’m so glad I didn’t lose this little community after all. Even if I am still slightly frizzled!