Also known as What Happened to the Blog?

I suppose the first thing that happened was I was a little absent from the blog anyway. June 16, 2013, my mom died. And then that turned into a spectacularly bad summer when in July, my aunt died. Then my mother’s ex-husband. Then one of my mom’s best friends. With all the chaos of paperwork, moving furniture, selling homes, and dealing with the government, I was overwhelmed, and just trying to put one foot in front of the other while helping everyone else grieve, and not lose clients, etc.

During that same summer, Joseph had a bunch of issues, other than the above. Joseph lost a psychologist (she moved), and got a new psychologist. Joseph lost his psychiatrist.  Joseph got a new psychiatrist. He lost that psychiatrist, and got ANOTHER psychiatrist. A few months later, Joseph was arrested, and put on another mental hold. Which wasn’t exactly surprising, considering everything that had happened to him, and us. But it still means management, and visits, and med adjustments. And court dates. That was fun.

After all that happened in such a short period of time… I needed to breathe. And grieve. So I wasn’t posting – I was internally processing. Then, I was ready to post again.

Only to find out that my site had been hacked, and was filled with malware. I tried to fix it. My host tried to help me fix it… but they’re not WordPress people really. It was too much for me technically speaking and kept coming back every time I thought I had it fixed. So… I hired Deanna. She was able to fix me, thank God. But that took more months from start to finish.

And then my posting was still sparse as I was still dealing mentally. The grieving process was still going on, and we had a lot to deal with with Joseph, which I’ll go through on another post.

I needed to look something up on my blog… and it wasn’t there. All that was there was one of those stupid “Hey you can buy this domain, and here’s all these ads and search terms.”

What?

Where?

WTF?

I went into my hosting account. Everything looked normal. My domain was there, my actual hosting services, everything looked normal. The account was paid up-to-date. You see, on my sites, I do everything on auto-renewal. So I don’t accidentally forget to pay something. And have something like my domain BE BOUGHT BY SOMEONE ELSE.

So, ultimately, in April of 2014 my domain was set to auto-renew… and it did not – an internal glitch of theirs. But, I didn’t realize it until August of 2014. So when I clued them in, with screen shots, etc, they let me know that yep – their system glitched, but it had already been bought, by the warehouser. Great. And then we were in limbo. For a year, with me bugging them monthly. The truth is I was considering litigation. Not like, “pay me oodles of money,” rather “buy the damn domain back!” But I can’t afford a lawyer. So I bugged and bugged and made myself a nuisance. Dealing with Joseph’s needs have taught me a thing or two about bugging right up to the line, without crossing the line.

But it seems there was a change in management. A new chick turned up in accounting management… Decided there was a problem with how I’d been handled. Actually CALLED ME ON THE PHONE. As a result of our conversation, I was given another domain, which she renewed for two years, and a year of paid hosting. In addition, my old domain’s coming up for parking sale in August, and they’re going to try and get it. If I do (and I’m pressing for it), I’ll do a redirect or something so all this work isn’t for naught.

So that’s the story… And I’m back.