I’m still here!

I haven’t posted anything in my blog since the middle of May, and now it’s the middle of July. My, how time flies when you’re having fun. (Smile)

Okay, there was some fun, and a lot of not fun. My son got married the end of May, and if any of you have ever planned a wedding, you know things were crazy here for at least a couple of weeks before the big day, and even for a few days after. Just about the time I got back to working on my writing regularly, I hurt my back and could hardly stand to sit at the computer for more than a short time here and there. During this time I was trying to help my teenage daughter get ready for a trip to California, her first trip without Mom and her first time on an airplane. She gets back and we turn our full attention to the Gulf, as first a tropical storm heads toward us, and then a week later, a hurricane. In the end we got little off of either. During that time my husband took a week’s vacation, which means he expected me to take one too. (Smile)

Now there’s Emily heading toward the Gulf, but we aren’t supposed to have to worry about her. That’s a good thing, because we have been working on our home again, and right now part of it doesn’t have a roof. Not a good time for a hurricane. (Smile) By the way, when I say we have been working on our home. I mean it. We do everything ourselves, from pouring cement, to running pipe, to putting up walls, hanging and finishing sheetrock, and everything before, in between, and after. That’s the only way we’ve ever been able to afford to add on and remodel and make our home more livable.

After the computer crash I had to switch to XP. I didn’t like it. Don’t like change almost ever. And worse of all, the program I built my website with didn’t like XP. I tried everything to fix it, but nothing worked. The pages looked mostly fine to visitors, but it was a nightmare for me to try to add or change anything at all. Finally I cried uncle and upgraded to a new site host service…double the price of course.

I’ve spent days trying to get each page fixed and up on the new service. Sadly, very sadly, after years of my site being on the same pages, and countless people being kind enough to link to them to help others find my site, now all pages but the home page will have a new address and none of those other links, will work. In fact, the original homepage address will even change. Only the http://www.charlottedillon.com/ address will stay the same. There’s nothing I can do about it though. Right now some of the old pages and addresses are still up, and some of the news ones are, and they are just kind of linked together here and there. I’m going to pay for the old service for at least another month, so I can finish copying all of my pages to the new one, and so that once I do, maybe I can put a notice up on the old pages about the new addresses, but I won’t be able to pay for both sites for very long.

Oh, the writing? Don’t faint, but I’ve actually managed to fit some writing in between the summer of my nightmare--which is what I’ve named this summer. I also got myself a gift, a really cheap but perfectly fine, laptop from Dell. Now I do all my writing on that only. So when I sit here at my desktop, I work on my site, do e-mail, handle my groups, even write in my blog. But when I turn that laptop on, nothing gets opened but Word and the manuscript I’m working on. It seems to be helping and I’m hoping my page count will really climb in the next couple of months.

I hope everyone else out there is having a great summer!