As you may have been able to tell, I had some issues with my blog for the past two weeks. On the night of Sunday, January 20th, I went to load pictures onto the blog for Monday’s post, and the site wouldn’t let me log in. I tried again and again, called my hosting site, looked to WordPress forums for support, and finally realized that in the end, there was nothing I could do but delete it and start over. However, I was smart enough to copy and paste everything over into a Microsoft Word document, and spent my Friday afternoon and Saturday reconstructing the site from the ground up, from fixing the appearance to re-publishing all 56 posts. I let this be a lesson to me, and I’m now sharing it with you: if you are a blogger and you don’t do so already, back up your website. I was lucky to have done what I did, and it really saved me. But it is the most devastating thing to see your blog completely wiped clean, blank and empty with those sample pages and posts and nothing else. I can’t imagine how I would be feeling right now if I had no copies of the posts anywhere.

Coincidentally, this whole experience is kind of a perfect analogy for my life lately: frustrating, confusing and exhausting. I still don’t know what happened to my blog. But there was a bright side to rebuilding it – I got to go back through all of my posts and see how I’ve changed. I got to fix random typos and spelling mistakes. I figured out how to re-organize my website. And I’ve done the same in my life this month: fixed things, changed things, cleared my head, re-evaluated my priorities, and took a look at where I’ve been in the past year and thought about what I’m going to do with myself next. And then more specifically, I slept in, finally scrapbooked a bit, caught up on work, spent a long time with a friend I haven’t talked to enough in recent times, and even made a new friend this past week.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that these deep and aggravating things are happening at this time of year. February has never been my month, and I remember last year as being a particularly terrible 28 days. But I’m hoping that the worst has passed. I’m being more conscious now about where my blog files are stored, and about how I’m handling things in my life. I see better times ahead.

And now, as a side note, here’s a social media update:

Take a peek at my Pinboards

Follow me on Instagram (although I can’t promise how often I’ll use it)

Follow along: Instagram • Pinterest • Tumblr • Twitter • Facebook • Bloglovin