… but not quite.

I have made a tactical error, basically. Here’s what happened …

When I registered grabbingsand.com so long ago, I was hosted by a friendly little company called LogJamming. It was run by two guys, just a pair of geeks who had the bandwidth. They established themselves by hosting Wil Wheaton’s blog, so I figured they could host mine. Nice fellas, too. Need support? Just find them on AIM and say so. They did all of their registering through a company called TwentyBones. So called because they’d register you on the big Wide World of Web for just twenty bucks. A deal at the time.

After some time, I left LogJamming, but I stuck with TwentyBones. Soon enough, they were bought out by a company called DomainMonger. I figured it hurt nothing to leave things as they were, so I let it stay. Their re-registration was just as inexpensive, after all. The last time I logged in to their website? 2005. And there’s the problem. They didn’t have my updated credit card info. They didn’t have my GMail address. And since I hadn’t given it a thought it three years, July 2008 arrived without me noticing that my domain was going to expire.

So grabbingsand.com expired. There is a search engine squatter where my blog used to be. The vultures, they move fast.

But all is not lost. I’ve backed up every piece of data from the old site. It is amazing what you accumulate over four or five years, even virtually. I had about 400MB worth of photos, mp3s and assorted nonsense. I’ve also managed to pull a complete backup of my previous WordPress database. The only problem is that it is pretty big, weighing in at over 8MB. That’s a lot of posts, but I’ve been doing this in one way or another for nine years.

So that’s why you’re looking at a rather skeletal blog today. If you’ve been a regular reader, I thank you, and I beg your patience. With any luck, I’ll be able to set everything back to mostly normal before the weekend is out.

(You know what the best thing about this seeming misfortune is? I didn’t freak out. Not all that much, anyway. Had this happened a couple of years ago, I would’ve railed and ranted, scaring the cats and making my wife wonder what happened to her sensible husband. But as it was, I saw what happened, muttered “You gotta be kidding me” a couple of times, then just went to work on finding a way to fix it. Maybe this means I’m growing up. Or something.)