DON'T TELL THEM TO GROW UP AND OUT OF IT

I don't know if it's all this talk of remodeling the bathroom or that back to school feeling, but I've been considering making some changes with the blog. I know. I'm surprised too. I usually only ever feel like this after attending a BlogHer conference. I'm skipping this year because of vacation time and money and the lack of both (new mantra: new bathtub). But there's been some thoughts in the back of my brain about moving the blog over to Square Space and sprucing things up a bit around here. The reason I have only been slightly thinking about it is the fact that I have zero knowledge of how this whole internet coding shit works. Every time I get a notice that this or that domain are set to expire, I go into panic mode. I'll spend an hour trying to figure out some password username configuration that Chris would have used to open an account. At some point in all of this, I end up sending a panicked "HELP ME!" email out to Todd. Then I'll finally figure out I'm in the completely wrong place any way and Todd emails me back telling me I'm in the wrong place anyway. I'm down to a list of five domains. They are all mostly Chris's. I've held on to his domain for a few reasons. First of all, he's somehow linked them all to his .info domain with it being the primary. I don't even know what this means. I do know that if I don't pay the yearly fee for this domain, all of the others stop working. I know this because I didn't pay the bill once. I was also holding on to Chris's blog because, well, it was his blog. His words. His crazy loopy thoughts. Well, somehow, in all my poking around hosting, I have messed up Chris's blog. The link to his page in my "bloggy goodness" is broken. It takes you to some other place telling you that this page has been eaten alive. OK, maybe not, but it's still a broken link. I fucked it up and I'm not really sure how to fix. No. I'm positive I don't know how to fix it. I don't even know how I broke it. I thought that I could never lose Chris's blog. Like that's the thing I keep forever along with his wedding ring. But it turns out that I'm OK without his blog. (I hope you guys are too.)

The part that makes it feel like someone is squeezing my chest is where I fly off on my own here. I'm going to be a domain of one. At least I think I will as soon as I figure out how to untangle the rest. All this time the blog has been association with other blogs. It's sort of been circled in among a list of others. Chris had created a blog commune, taking care of not just my blog but our friends blogs too. There I was nestled in the middle of them all. It's hard for me to own this space solely as my own. Chris was the writer. I was just the record keeper or secretary of our life. Though I would have never started blogging or writing if Chris hadn't created this space for me, I have to come to terms with the fact that it is truly my own. Chris built the house, but I made it a home. A haven.

I'm still on the fence about some of the changes I may or may not make. My blog doesn't have ads and doesn't generate an income. I need to consider costs, but it's time for me to take action.