Last night, I watched the movie Julie & Julia. I’m not writing a review here, so I’ll just tell you that I liked the movie and get on with what I really want to say.

This movie is about a blogger, who is also a foodie, who is also trying to “find herself;” there was no way that I was going to be able to watch it without being affected by it.

At the very least, the blogging aspect has influenced me to try a little harder to keep up with my blog. I doubt I’ll be a huge success (in terms of blogging) by the end of this year, but I can see that just like me she had days when she almost didn’t want to blog at all. I am going to assume that if you are reading this, then you can relate to that, since you are probably also a blogger.

As far as being a foodie is concerned, there’s no doubt that I love food, and eating (if you’ve ever seen me in person or in photographs the evidence is indisputable). I’m not sure I would ever commit to Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days; and I know I’ll never write a breakthrough, revolutionary cook book; but the fact remains that I love food.

Which leaves us with trying to find oneself. There’s a scene at the begining of the movie when Julie is out to lunch with her suit wearing career girl friends and you can almost see the words “I FEEL LIKE A FAILURE” written across her face in black magic marker. I’m going to assume that the girlfriends in the movie were more of a caricature than an accurate representation of Julie’s actual friends – if only so that my career girl friends do not think that I see them that way. It’s really tough to be the only person in the room who doesn’t have a CAREER, and it’s hard not to feel like a HUGE FAILURE, no matter how happy I am in my job. I can relate to sitting at a table with a bunch of people who are doing what they want to be doing WITH A PURPOSE and not feeling comfortable discussing my job, which is something I do because I have to work to earn money to pay my bills, and I really haven’t got a purpose at all.

I harbour no illusions that someday this will lead to a book deal, or that I will ever become so popular a blogger that I’ll be able to sell ad space and live off the income my blog brings in. I won’t pretend that I have never fantasized about it, but on the whole I am realistic in my expectations of where this is all going. My blog is at once a diary/journal where I can record the various goings on of my life on a day-to-day basis, and a newsletter for keeping my friends and family in the loop of said goings on. I set myself some goals from time to time, but on the whole, I want to keep it light and fun because if it becomes too much like work, I might not keep writing.

Having gotten the disclaimer out of the way, I am inspired by Julie (the Julie in the movie, who may or may not be exactly like the Julie in real life) to blog about something more meaningful (to me, and hopefully to others) than just the random blah blah blah of my day-to-day life. As much as keeping a journal for the sake of journaling alone is a good thing; keeping a journal to log your progress towards achieving a goal is a great thing. I’m pretty sure the average reader would rather live vicariously through me plowing through my unfinished knitting projects (complete with photos) than live vicariously through me taking a couple of loads down to the laundromat.

I know this blog is advertised as being about my journey to motherhood – and I missed the flight AGAIN this cycle (more on that later) – but really it’s also about me, the person making the journey to motherhood.

Dear Readers,

I don’t need you to tell me that commenting on my blog is not working for you. I am already aware that this is the case – and not at all happy about it – and I am working on getting it fixed. This situation seems to be a combination of two or more issues, and I am seeking assistance to resolve them, but apparently, this is not some “oh yeah we get that all the time” issue.

In the meantime, feel free to try to leave a comment, but if it doesn’t go through go ahead and email me using the contact form, and once things are settled, I’ll manually add your comments to the blog post they go with.

Last week, in a series of unfortunate events, I lost all my blog content from the month of December 2009. This included all my day-to-day posts, as well as all my static content. It’s going to take me a while to re-write all of that, and I have to do it from memory, so things won’t be the same here – I’m not even going to try to recreate most of the posts, I’ll focus on the static content.

There are certain blog posts that I wish I could recreate from memory, but I know that any attempt will fall short of my expectations. The posts I lost that I am most proud of include one titled: Thanks Dad! I wrote it after reading a post someone else had written praising her husband’s parenting; it was an ode to my father and his parenting.

As any blogger can imagine, I was incredibly disappointed by the loss. This blog – particularly the posts that were lost – is a journal of my thoughts and feelings during this exciting time of our lives. Deciding to have a family, trying to get pregnant, (hopefully) discovering that we are expecting are events that I want to record for the future. This is the Marshall Family History in the making.

I am planning to spend this weekend blogging. Usually, that means reading all the posts that have accumulated in my Bloglines, and commenting on as many of them as I can – I limit myself to relevant and positive-attitude comments, if I can’t think of anything pleasant and on-topic to say, I don’t say anything – and then writing a post of my own. This weekend, it’ll be a bit more intensive.

Lately, when I am working on the PC, I notice that when I click on send/submit/okay it doesn’t always go through. For example, I have typed out tweets in Hootsuite, hit send now, and minimized the window to work on something else, only to return minutes (or hours) later and find the same message still in the text entry box.

There’s a lesson in there about double-checking that when I click on the send/submit/okay button or link that it was properly processed.

I’ve also noticed that occasionally, when I have two buttons or links to choose from – send/submit/okay and cancel – sometimes, I hit the cancel button for reasons unknown.

There’s a lesson in there about double-checking that when I click on the send/submit/okay button or link that I clicked the correct button or link.

Generally, neither of these two issues leads to anything serious. Sometimes, it just means that I respond to a tweet two hours after it was first posted, instead of two minutes. Sometimes, I have to fill out an online form all over again. Not a big deal, at all.

Yesterday, a combination of these two issues and my obsessive need for a tidy virtual desktop lead to a total disaster in terms of my blog.

Simply put, and without all the minute details, I was attempting to move my Wordpress blog from one URL to another on the same server – because my current URL registration expires in less than a month, and I don’t want to renew it – and somehow I failed to save a backup of the posts on my desktop – or, possibly, I did save it, but in my fervor to not have unnecessary files on it, I attempted to move it and accidentally deleted it, or purposefully deleted without paying attention to what I was deleting. During all the rigamarole of the switchover, I managed to delete all the posts from my sql database – because I do things like that sometimes without really thinking about it – but assured myself it was all good because I had made a backup BEFORE I started the entire process, only to discover that I could not find the backup A-N-Y-W-H-E-R-E.

At first, I thought that I must just have misplaced the file, so I looked in all the likely – and increasingly unlikely – spots on my hard drive. Then I downloaded a utility that would do a cursory search for recently deleted files, which did not find it, but did find JPGs I deleted in October 2009. Then I downloaded a utility that would do a deep scan, which was still running this morning when I checked before going to work.

I left out the part about how I cried for an hour while trying to find the file. And how I tried to find reasons to blame Jason for all of this – if he had put on a movie instead of listening to music on his headphones, I would have been watching a movie instead of trying to move my blog. And how I was in a terrible funk all afternoon and evening, mourning the loss of my blog.

There is some good news. Since I only moved my blog to a self-hosted URL on December 6, 2009, and I did not wipe out the original blogs, I am able to re-import all the posts still saved on the blog host servers. Yay! Also, I thought I had lost all my photos and art, but it turns out they are saved on the server and losing the sql database did not affect that.

Hopefully, I will learn a lesson from this, but probably not, since this is the second time I have accidentally lost an entire blog – the first time, I learned the lesson about backing up the sql database and look how much help THAT was. Maybe the lesson is, don’t move your blog, just pay the fee to renew your URL registration.

I have decided to approach today with a fresh outlook. I am not going to worry about the month’s worth of posts that were lost. I am going to look forward and not back, and renew my commitment to posting regularly a few times each week, with the weekly features that I had planned. I am going to do my best to rewrite the static pages that were lost – who knows, I might even write better ones.

When I get home from work, the deep scan will (hopefully) have completed. If it happens to dredge up the lost file, I will celebrate. If it doesn’t, I’m okay with that.

I created new gravatars for Jason and myself:


Erin’s blog & twitter gravatar


Jason’s blog gravatar


Jason’s twitter gravatar

[@WannabeMomErin Jan 16, 2010 12:52 PM]