I never meant to take a 10 month hiatus. Really. At no point did I say “fuck it, I’m taking 10 months off”. But somewhere around 6 months ago, I realized that I wanted to write, but something was kind of holding me back. Not just time constraints, but there was something else.
I am no longer the person I was when I started this journal way back in November of 2000. At that time I was working as a web designer at a dot-com and making pretty decent cashola. I had only owned my house for a little over a year, and my main form of activity was working on that house. Other than that, I did a hell of a lot of sitting on my ass, making sure the couch didn’t stray from its appointed spot.
Many of you have been around since those days long ago, and I appreciate your tenacity. You’ve been witness to my evolution. I’ve gone from a house-remodeling web-designing fool to a bike-riding administrative-assitant fool. (Some things never change – I’m still a fool.)
But I haven’t been sharing all the other good things that have been going on in my life. For instance, some of you may remember a few brief mentions of the Beau Hunk Buck Stud. Even fewer of you may have a brief recollection of a momentary train-wreck that quickly disappeared from the site, followed by nary a further mention of the Beau Hunk.
Well, in spite of everything, the Beau Hunk and I have stuck together. He’s been hanging around for over a year now, and he’s not showing any of the signs of running for the hills (yet?). As a matter of fact, there’s pretty good indication that he may be sticking around a while longer. And this makes me happy. Very, very, happy. So yeah, old Haggie may have snagged herself a man-thing. For certain she’s got yet another really good friend who’s kind, caring, fun, and pretty goddamned easy on the eyes too! What’s to bitch about that??
Between spending time with the Beau Hunk, riding with Da Goils, working, etc etc., writing never happened. When I wanted to write, I didn’t have time. When I had time, I didn’t want to write. 10 months went by as I became procrastination’s bitch.
So what changed? Well, it was sort of a cosmic confluence of events really. Over my hiatus I struggled with whether to quit keeping an online journal altogether. That certainly would be easy, but I didn’t really want to quit. Then again, I didn’t want to keep laboring under the weight of all those past entries either. So I considered taking the archives offline, but then I struggled with how I would structure the site, blah blah blah. I couldn’t decide, so I didn’t decide. Mmmmm…procrastination. Yummy!
Then fate sort of stepped in and gave me a kick in the ass. It all started with my web hosting company suddenly going tits up – without notice, fuck you very much. One day I could update my sites (I have others besides this one), and the next day I couldn’t. The company’s website no longer had an 800 number posted, and there was a notice saying they were no longer accepting new accounts. Uh oh, she’s dead Jim.
Thus ensued much running around and hand-wringing on my part, trying to get the sites that I administer re-hosted. In the midst of all this trauma-drama, I found a host that was economically reasonable, reliable and highly recommended. But they didn’t offer support for ASP. All my previous pages had been written in ASP. It’s my favorite language. But truth be told, the only thing I used ASP for was layout templates and running the guestbook database. Some of you may remember that I took my guestbook down ages ago, so that wasn’t really even a factor anymore. The bonus was that the new host offered WordPress as an auto-install.
So the decision was made. I’ve ditched my archives and I’m starting anew. You’ll notice that this page is pretty much a standard WordPress template. The web designer in me kind of chafes at the idea of a standard template. But here’s the deal: this site isn’t about layout. It never was. It’s about the content – the words. And those are all mine.
My boss says I can’t write on this site anymore because I’m not bitter. Truth be told I never really was. That moniker was always meant to be tongue in cheek. But there is a bit of truth in what he says. I have evolved from the person I was when I started this journal, lo those thousands of years ago. I think this particular evolution is a good one, but it was holding me back in some ways. Now it’s time to throw off the past and move forward.
But I’m still keeping the name.