Disaster

It seems Bloggedup.com has decided to pull the plug on free accounts for good. The site has wavered on offering small accounts for free over my time using one; sometimes you could sign up, sometimes they said all the free space was taken. But still, they never went about simply removing all the active free accounts.

That changed today. Scott called me this evening and asked if I'd checked my site at all today. I hadn't -- I haven't done much with it since getting home. So he informed me that pulling up our site addresses only brought up this: "There is no website configured at this address."

Great.

I have a backup copy of my diary, but it only covers up to September 2003. That's three months' worth of entries vanished. Fortunately, I remembered that the wonderful Google caches a copy of each site it crawls, meaning that there was a second "backup" of my site available. I managed to download my archives from October and Novemeber from Google, as well as the most recent entries for December. I'm still missing the five days' worth of entries made between December 1 and December 8, but I don't think there's any way to get those back short of Bloggedup deciding to restore my site.

Anyway, since arriving home basically all I've been doing is baking cookies. I've now made frosted sugar, gingerbread men, "loaded" oatmeal, thimbles (very small butter cookies), almond snowballs and snickerdoodles. My back is killing me from cleaning the kitchen so much. I blame the stone floors.

That's not to say I didn't get a nice welcome the evening I arrived. I would have gotten a better one at the airport, but my plane was delayed so many times because of the snow that everyone gave up on waiting for me except my parents. When I finally did arrive at my grandma's, everyone had already finished dinner. Oh well. At least as soon as I walked in the door Gracie lit up and told me, "I missed you so much! I thought your plane was never going to land!" Awww. I even got a hug from one of my little brothers.

The other event of recent days concerns my dog Oscar. The poor puppy has some sort of infection on his ear that has been there since I left for school in September, I think. On top of that, he seems to have injured his foot somehow, as he keeps licking it and crying.

And then there's the gas. Yuck -- I have to stop giving him cookies. Whew. (Waves hand in front of nose.)