Pseudotherapy

Welcome to Day?Four of my Big 5th celebration! In honor of my five-year anniversary on July 3rd, I?m doing a week of posts celebrating my quirky blogging history. You?re all invited to join me in this retrospective romp.

And while we’re celebrating, please plan on stopping by Buddha On The Road on Friday, when John celebrates his one-year blogging anniversary! Do it before you head to the beach and get drunk, k?

* * * * *

In February 2006, Bret and I were offered jobs with a young company based in Georgia. The company was a joint endeavor of two old friends of Bret’s, and his brother Randy was already working for them. Bret, who’d lived in Georgia most of his life, had been singing its praises to me for three years, and was thrilled at the prospect of moving back home. For a multitude of reasons, I was more than willing to make the move ? although the idea of living 3,000 miles away from Juli made me sick with dread. True, I’d moved away from the Pacific once before and nearly had a nervous breakdown, but at least this time we’d be within a day’s drive of another ocean. Plus, the money was good, we’d be working from home and they offered to pay for our move. We decided to take the chance.

Literally from the moment we arrived, the move was a disaster. The house we’d leased was a rundown mess in a tiny town that didn’t even have a Taco Bell, much less a Starbucks. The Bible Belt mindset and lack of separation between church and state appalled me. Six weeks after we moved, the company laid me off. Two months later they let Bret go, and folded soon after that. And as the weather warmed, the bugs came out ? and they all thought I was a tasty dish. Even Bret had to admit Georgia was not as wonderful as he’d remembered. But we were stranded ? broke, living on unemployment and told at every job we applied for that we were way too over-qualified.

At first, I poured my unhappiness out on a blog called Poppy Among The Peaches. I’m not sure I ever had an upbeat post on that entire blog. But my online friends kept urging me to give Georgia a chance, and to stop being so negative, so I decided to try accepting the many changes in my life. I can’t honestly say that I ever loved living in “Bugbite Holler,” but life did gradually become more bearable. As part of my self-conducted therapy, I deleted Poppy and created my very first WordPress blog, The Write Coast.

Since I wasn’t working,?I had beaucoups time to be creative. I posted almost every day, writing about my new life and the changes I was going through, and illustrating with my own photos. I loved everything about The Write Coast ??the name, the tagline, the?look, the?content. During the remaining months we lived in Bugbite Holler, my life?revolved around my blog. I became more devoted to it than?I’d ever been before or since.?I took part in the 2006 Blogathon, posting every 30 minutes for 24 hours, even though my fucktarded hosting service went down one hour into the blogathon, forcing me to frantically set up The Write Coast Redux on blogspot. In October, I transformed TWC into The Haunted Coast for my 30 Days Of Halloween, and had the funnest month of blogging EVER. God,?I wish you could see how it looked that month, just an awesome gothic look! The next month, I did NaBloPoMo. TWC became The Write Coast’s Yule Blog for the Holidailies in December, all dressed up in holiday attire.?

And then, the miracle happened. A series of seemingly unrelated events all came together and made our return to California possible. All we needed was a place to stay. MY BFF Sheryl offered us a room in her house until we could get our own place, so we packed up everything that would fit in a U-Haul trailer, threw the cats in the car and hauled ass back home. All that happened in the space of a single week. We were back in San Diego County in time for Christmas.

The one negative about The Write Coast was the hosting service I had at that time. It was a constant pain in my ample ass, an example of?criminal incompetence in business if ever I’ve seen one. Think of every?horrific story you’ve ever heard about an online company, and it probably applies. There was only one thing worse than doing business with them, and that was attempting to STOP doing business with them. We eventually had to send a letter threatening legal action to get them to stop taking money out of our account. I became so enraged at them that, after a particularly frustrating, obscenity-laden phone call to their Customer Disservice, I logged into my account and deleted EVERYTHING from their servers. BAM! Just like that, both Chronic Listaholic and The Write Coast were gone. I was so?furious that I didn’t even take the time to save backups. Luckily, I had run my?regular backups the previous week, so I only lost the last few posts. But my impulsiveness sure left my online friends wondering WTF happened. Needless to say, I was beyond sorry for my rashness the next day. I should have just moved everything to a different service! What a dumbass. And then to compound it, I sold both domains within a week. Why? I do not know. At the time, it seemed like the logical next step. Again with the dumbassness. After that, I couldn’t even resurrect them with another host. That is, until I?created Pseudotherapy and got the idea to set up subdomains for both Chronic Listaholic and The Write Coast, which is how you are now able to read them. I haven’t fixed all the image links yet, but I’m working on it! It makes me happy to be able to visit them again.

Question Of The Day: What was the name of the so-called hosting service that I refer to in this post? If you weren’t reading then or don’t remember, you can either search the archives or take a guess. Hint: It gets deservedly terrible ratings, and has been blackballed in some places. The first correct answer posted in the comments wins a prize! [Juli: Honey, you're not eligible. Sorry.]

Oh yeah, prizes … it’s looking like gift e-cards right now, because sheesh, shipping adds up!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Blogging, The Big 5th. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.