Blogging again... after 14 years

Well, I'm blogging again, sort of. Back in the early days, shall we say '94ish, I used to publish a website with frequent updates, very much in the same vein as a modern day blog. I had just spent most of '93 in Madrid, Spain as an au pair (story for another day), with no computer and no car, and returned to the states right about the time that CompuServe was popular for connecting to the Internet. Details are fuzzy, we may have had some other service before or after (Prodigy, AOL, Earth something...), but I have a vague recollection of connecting in Portland, then definitely in New Haven (no, I was not at Yale: another story for another day). Those were the days when it felt like you could find every website that existed with just a little poking around.

At the time, one of my passions was talking about Motherloss (still recommend the books Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers), and connecting with others who had lost a mother at a relatively early age (I lost my mother to Ovarian Cancer when I was a 20yo immature college student). I also ran one of the only fan sites dedicated to the works of John Irving, one of my all time favorite authors.

But eventually other things drew my attention away. I started teaching myself graphic design and worked for a couple of small businesses in New Haven before starting my forensic science based consultancy and eventually moving to the Bay Area. That basically sucked the next 8 years of my life away. No time for blogging (or vacations) when you're maintaining a website that provides online training 24/7, plus wearing all of the small business hats that one must with a 3-person company. Don't get me wrong, during my forensic time I had a lot of unique experiences, met many very interesting people from all over the world, made a life-long friend, and got in a little travel to places like Australia. But it was exhausting - and it ended badly, as business with ex-spouses often do.

So why blog now? What's kept me from blogging or similar endeavors over the last few years is that I'm now in IT consulting and I spend every day in front of the computer. Often the last thing I want to do is sit in front of the laptop for my free time! But I've been having fun with Twitter; it has sort of revived me. With Twitter, you have to be short and concise - and there's really not a lot of room for perfectionism. Twitter doesn't take up a lot of my time, so I'm hoping combining it with blogging will be manageable and fun. And I've met some other bloggers in Bend that seem to manage their blogs and lives just fine, and have inspired me. I've also learned to let go of a lot of my perfectionism in the rest of my life, so I don't feel the need to take massive amounts of time creating the perfect website, or the perfect blog (OK, I do feel the need, but I'm resisting it). As Flylady says, "Progess, not Perfection."

So who knows where this will go? You'll probably find me talking a lot about my man (also referred to as my honey, my dh, etc.), my animals, my step-kids, my vegetarian lifestyle, animal cognition, books, and animal rights. And maybe a little about work here and there, i.e., SharePoint, UI Design, etc.