What happened to your blog?!?

what happened is that 1,101 individual, lovingly crafted blog posts had been spontaneously replaced by a single, solitary “sorry, no blog posts matched your criteria” message.

#$%&$%.

i logged into the wordpress admin and the dashboard welcomed me to edit my 0 posts.

#$%&$%, @&#$%^.

when i logged into the super techie backed (phpmyadmin, which administers that database that powers the blog) it said that the my wp_posts table — the one with the content for all 1,101 posts — was unavailable because it was “in use”.

#$%&$%, @&#$%^ — #%$&$%.

suddenly, the notion of replacing the notion of sparklet’s babybook with a happy, communal blog seemed like a pretty stupid idea.

suddenly, the notion of only backing up said blog twice in the last two years (August 2010, July 2009) seamed like a pretty bad idea.

at some point in the week hours of the morning — after two support tickets and 45 minutes of googling/panicking — i figured out that the database had “just” become corrupted, and i “just” needed to repair the table. after another 30 minutes of googling to find out how to do such a thing, i did it.

and it worked.

and now i’m successfully procrastinating on a plan to backup the website — at least until after the *next* disaster.

now, i’m not exactly a linear blogger — i’ve usually got 20 or more drafts posts going at any one time, many of which will eventually be backdated by twelve months or more. just last week I added 40+ posts about our trip to Europe in Spring 2009.

but, everything i do is in service of my horrific memory — the point of going back and blogging about Europe isn’t so others will read, but so that future me can remember.

(speaking of, i just spent 15 minutes reading through my posts tracking Sparklet’s “firsts”, and last week i spent what felt like an hour digging through the 50+ “photo of the week” posts tracking her growth. awesome.)

back at post #500 i joked that:

i have doubled the wonderful women in my life, and will certainly be doubling the silly, stupid things that i want to write down so i don’t forget.

… and that has certainly turned out to be the case. i’ve never had so much material to write about, or so many things i’ve not wanted to forget.

so, thanks to my 2.7 3.7 loyal readers for tagging along — here’s hoping that the next 1000 will be as much fun as the first.

i started blogging back in 2004 … i was bored, i was recently single, and i had just survived a near death experience at the hands of a happy young Christian soccer mom driving a hummer.

when i started blogging, i held absolutely no pretense that anybody was reading. i blogged purely for myself, to give my future self something to look back on and remind me of the things i had seen, the places i had been, and the things that i had done.

that still (mostly) holds true even today. i have an absolutely horrific memory, so need to write things down or they are lost for good.

don’t get me wrong, i’m absolutely cheesed that other people are joining in the fun as i chronicle all sorts of embarrassing stories about the lady sparkler, but in the end … i blog because i never want to forget what happened, or the look in her face or what i was thinking at the time.

with that in mind, i apologize for the banalities that are coming down the pike. with baby sparklet, i have doubled the wonderful women in my life, and will certainly be doubling the silly, stupid things that i want to write down so i don’t forget.

here’s hoping that the next 500 will be as much fun as the first.