Very odd. I had a gardening blog. But it's vanished.
Granted, I had neglected it, just like this one, for a month or so, due to technical problems with both my brain and my laptop/modem/router (but I won't start on that).
Then last night I went to post on the gardening blog and it's gone.
Not just the blog, but the entire website of which it was part.
Vapourised.
Now, this is a site which I helped set up in a previous life (and only about 2 years ago) in New Zealand, where I was the editor of the magazine - the site was the online version.
New Zealand Lifestyle Block - NZ's "premier magazine for the small farmer". It was fun. Each month I got to choose between a cute piglet and a cute lamb for the cover star, instead of grinning humans who are, frankly, deeply boring month after month.
Yet in spite of working there for years, editing the damn thing, and blogging for them (by request) for another year I got no hint at all that this was happening.
I heard a rumour last month that the mag had been sold by ACP. I can't see any press releases to that effect on the ACP website, nor indeed any sign that the company ever founded and published the magazine.
The URL redirects to a completely different site/blog which has no mention of the previous site, and no advice to the painstakingly developed online community of bloggers, image posters or readers that it is gone.
No archive. No sign of life at all.
Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe any moment Bobby will step out of the shower and I'll realise it never happened.
Anyway it's all gone, including those precisely crafted posts of mine (needless to say I don't have a copy), and that precipitates what is probably a necessary change to this blog.
I'm changing the focus of this blog. This might help (technical problems aside) with my block about blogging recently - having too many to sustain just makes me feel grumpy and not want to go near any of them. So now this blog will cover all of it: writing, reading, thinking, collecting, technology, gardening and other random stuff.
Once I've bashed the bejesus out of the modem and router, or whatever drastic action is required at this desperate stage, I might even be able to post properly.
