Well, it’s about time.

Around four years ago, I started blogging. I hated the word – such an ugly word, “blog” – but I loved the concept. I was moving to the UK and I wanted to keep my friends and family updated on my life without writing long repetitive letters, and I wanted to force myself to keep a journal and keep writing, even if most of the time I was scribbling informally about the lack of root beer in the UK or the absurdly high number of banana peels one encounters while walking the streets of London.

Very quickly, I found that blogging wasn’t just about reporting on the interesting things I did, it served as a much-needed kick in the pants – a constant helpful nag that yanked me off the sofa and forced me into the streets of London to find new and interesting experiences. Sometimes these were banana peels, other times it was rowboats on rooftops or celebrities skulking in the shrubbery.

That was ticking along nicely for quite some time, but then I moved back to the US (yay!), started blogging for my work (yay!), had a baby (yay!), and, well, the whole personal blogging thing got relegated to the back burner rather quickly (boo!). Occasionally I’d find a moment here and there to write, and even managed to accidentally defame a clown in the process (long story). But the drive had sped off in a puff of smoke, the focus had faded, and the spare time I used to find to write seemed like a pleasant but distant memory of simpler times, like happy recollections of recess in elementary school.

At some point in the past year I found myself with one dormant blog, another one that so ambitious and daunting it never got off the ground, one that I wasn’t entirely sure why I had it at all, and one that was about the goings on of my monthly breakfast club (that no one was reading). Nothing was getting anywhere, and I hit a wall of frustration I came to call “the blog jam” and occasionally prodded it with a stick to see if it would go away without putting much effort into it. Sadly that wasn’t the case.

But then came the Ukrainian hackers, who managed to slip some malicious code onto my sites getting all of my sites blacklisted by Google. It was the best thing that happened to my blogs in the past year, because it gave me the opportunity to press the big red button and nuke everything, wiping the slate clean. Cheers, hacker guys and your pet robots, that was just what I needed. You wanted my sites more than I did.

So now the blog jam has been blasted to bits, and this is what is emerging from the rubble – rough at the moment, but hopefully prettier and functional in the near term. My original blog, DSRB, is still resting peacefully on it’s creaky old Blogger platform – go visit it and say hello if you wish – but I’m officially calling it quits over there and starting up here with renewed energy. One blog to rule them all. Or something like that.

More soon – I promise.