thoughts from an empty head

The moment of convergence that told me that both this blog and my intestinal tract were headed for big trouble came after the Chinese potluck I had for lunch yesterday.

Over at my work, one of the many ideas that management promotes is that we all need to play nice together, which is an attitude they foster in numerous small ways. One of those ways is a monthly potluck lunch, which is sometimes themed towards various cultures. This month, in honor of the Olympics, the theme was Chinese.

At the end of lunch, one of my coworkers passed out fortune cookies. I remember vividly what mine said: “You are about to have a pleasant experience.”

Four hours later, my intestinal tract was rumbling in a manner reminiscent of a serious earthquake.

Thirty minutes after that, I opened my blog to find all of my posts had vanished.

Not being terribly experienced in MySQL or even the slightest bit knowledgeable of how the workings of WordPress really meshed together, I proceeded to poke around for most of last night and a good portion of today trying to get my blog to work again. That is, when I wasn’t busy visiting the porcelain god of frustration.

Finally, sometime around 6 pm today, I gave up, sick as a dog and frustrated with both the complete lack of usable help with MySQL on the net and the complete disaster I helped create in the vain attempt to reinstall my last workable database. I downloaded as many themes and plugins that I still wanted, saved any photos I could not reproduce, and nuked my blog from orbit. A whole year’s worth of stories, poetry, love and loss, rants and remembrances – gone.

I know: I should have backed up my blog’s database. And in my defense, I honestly thought that this was happening behind the scenes. I had a plugin that was supposed to do this for me. And it did – right up until April of this year.

*sigh*

At any rate, I’ve brought back the old Blogger joint as a stopgap, should anything else go wrong here.

I think I’ll miss the stories most of all. I’m not missing over much the political rants or the attempts at mockery. There are some posts about Rebecca that I will miss terribly, posts that remind me of what it was to fall in love again after doing without for so very long and how it felt to lose that love in such a senseless manner. But the stories – those I’ll miss most of all. Those little bits of prose were the seeds of something grand, I think. Worlds that could have been are now gone.

I guess it’s time to build new worlds now.

So I’ll be gradually rebuilding the blog for the next few days. I have a post or two that I can reconstitute, and I’ll be adding them tonight, and I’m working on a longer piece of somewhat darker fiction that should be wrapped up by the weekend.

Most of all, I’ll be busy just trying to be better at doing this blog thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.