Letting Go of the Past

Save your work!

Recently, I discovered that my original blog on the Typepad platform is gone.

Most of it is forgettable and a chronicle of me being wrong about many things, the chief of them being Operation Iraqi Freedom and the presidency of George W. Bush. To be specific, I was a proponent of both and now I am not.

However, some of the content was re-published at my Google blog and here. Nevertheless, there were posts that hurt to lose.

• · The Herding Series

• · My elegy for Rob “Acidman” Smith who has been gone now for 20 years

• · Series about the Kenyan Civil War of 2008

• · Various call-outs of Barack Obama, published before his first election; I was right about him

I have my Dropbox and have several old laptops around here which may contain drafts of these posts, and it’s one of the things to which the funds from this campaign will go to, after the essential items are covered, of course.

This isn’t the first time that my work has been lost. You may remember that I did a lot of work at Peter Ingemi’s Da Tech Guy Blog and that his host server destroyed not just my work, not just Peter’s, but also the various bloggers who posted at his site. The one post there that I miss greatly: The Blood Libeling of the Luo Tribe of Kenya. That post served to dispute the widespread demonization of a tribe just because Barack Obama – allegedly - is a member. (As you may recall, I am a member too.)

I’ve checked the Web Archive for some of these posts, and it appears to have been sanitized. Perhaps ‘compromised’ is a better word.

Lesson learned. I will be storing all my work on my old, functioning laptop and my phone. Heck I might as well print out the important ones and the ones I’m most proud of and keep them in a notebook.

And I can hear it now: “What if there’s a fire?” Remember: there is no perfect earthly solution to any problem. But that does not mean that solutions should not be tried.

I can’t decide if I’m sad about this or not. Wistfulness might be a better description of my emotions about this. Or maybe having to endure so much loss in a short period of time is keeping me sane.

And guess what! Sanity is the goal here and I’m grateful to God for it.

Blessings

Since this post and the last one are about catastrophic losses, it’s necessary to remind you - and myself - of a couple of blessings.

Many of those who were fans of the original Baldilocks Blog remain fans to this very day and are subscribers to this newsletter. In addition, they are cherished friends, even thorns in my side like Charles W. Clark. I don’t know what my life would be like without you all, but I know you have made it better. I love you.

And, in the last post, I asked about infographics. No one gave me an answer, but, as it turns out, I am already a subscriber to a YouTube series on the topic. Provision.

I’ll probably test some of it out here. No judgment! Okay maybe a little.

*****

I’ve received donations and good suggestions about my latest bleg.