Seven Year Scatch




I have spent the better part of the last week finding myself.  Not in my usual Zen ways and means, but in my geek girl persona where I had to rosin the technical bow and play the Recover SQL Symphony.  In short … I lost the last seven years of my blog.

I’ve kept diaries since I was 8 years old.  As a teenager I used a rainbow of felt tip pens and spiral bound notebooks to tell my stories of angst and anger.  By the time I was a young mother, I refereed to my writing as journals and than as with any high-tech creative attention drone, I migrated to blogs when my life turned upside down and I left my academic career when I became too ill to work.

My first blog entry was in 2007 .. the Death of a Dharma Dog, and it would become my first of many “Not So Shaggy Dog Stories.”  No surprise that my CoolKarma blog morphed into KarmaBytes and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some type of cosmic irony at play that all of my data for the last seven years was wiped out this week.

As a tech savvy woman who spent over two dozen years heading up a college campus technology department, I must have had a back up of my blog, right?  Well, electronic copies of the articles, yes?  Paper print outs at the very least, hmm?

No. Nope.  And Nada.

Unfathomable yes?  No viable backup?  After a slew of helpful live chat sessions with BlueHost, I bit the bullet and purchased a “backup pro” plan for $20 which enabled me to see the hosting company’s April Backup of my database.  After hunting through machine code I found the correct SQL file and hand-hacked it t.o work with my new wordpress install.  And after another few hours of plugin tweeks I was able to recover the last seven years of my life.

During the past week of uncertainty, I gave a lot of thought about what it would to loose the blog.  What does it mean to LOOSE a Zen blog?  How does this fit into my practice of non-attachment?  Is this really some koan of Empty Mind?  While I realize that I may be the only person who actually reads my refrigerator art.  I enjoy my writing and re-reading what I’ve written as I watch history repeat itself time and again.

My family of course is amazing and punny.  Each of them offered to help me REWRITE the last seven years of my life … of course with their unique spin doctoring.  Truth is I would do well to have a new story.  Nonetheless I realize all too well that losing my blog … is a first world problem.  So, I count my blessings that THIS time I was able to pull the rabbit out of the cat’s hat, but I realize that the next time Thing1 and 2 play havvoc with my database I could very well loose everything.  Because that’s just the nature of form … its here for a while and we can enjoy it while we can, but ultimately everything returns to the formless.  The empty space.  the blank page.  Or as some may believe … the recycle bin. 🙂

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