Endings and Beginnings

Not my dad's brain, but you get the idea.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated, but the reality hasn’t been sunshine and roses.

My father nearly died in March after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. If it wasn’t for my mother’s sharp eye and the world class stroke center 3 miles away, he wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to make the miraculous recovery he has slowly made. But the morning of his stroke marked a clear ending and new beginning in the life of my entire family.

This blog has always been a space for me to vent, to work though ideas and encourage debate. And despite a desire to continue frequent updates, this is entertainment, not a job.  And really, getting cranky about dog politics is a luxury for times when everything else in life is going A-O-K.  My dogs have been such a wonderful diversion lately, and an integral part in my father’s recovery, so I just haven’t had the motivation to tackle the dog-world darkness out there when there’s been so much dog-light right here, and more pressing problems to address off-blog.

After finally re-establishing some sense of routine in my new life, I returned to the blog only to find that it had been deleted by Blogger and marked as a spam site by Google!

My father, a.k.a "Guano the Lawnboy," in better times.

Oh joy, when it rains, it pours. I’ve had to pull in favors with old college friends who now work at Google, sift through Google’s horrible help forum, cyber-stalk the one person who could turn my blog back on, and tell off some other Google employee who wanted me to “make concessions” to him to get my blog back.

Needless to say that I can’t trust my content in the hands of a company who would delete it WITHOUT notice of any kind before or after, not respond to their help forum for over 6 weeks, not publish a name, phone number, or e-mail of anyone who can actually help, and then want to chastise me for wanting my content back.

So I’ve made the jump to WordPress (rather quick and painless) and now have my content under my own control. I highly recommend it to anyone still over at Blogger.  Getting a domain name and hosting is an afternoon project, and moving the blog is actually very simple as WordPress does all the work for you. Took 10 minutes.

The new blog address is: http://borderwars.astraean.com/

And my feed is STILL http://feeds.feedburner.com/BorderWars … hopefully this is seamless for almost all of you.

So goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress, and thank you all for sticking around.  Drop a comment or two now and then to let me know you’re out there.

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