Say hi to the new TEdASPHERE Globe

I’ve been blogging (and am all growed up now and call it “publishing a suite of nine vanity blogs”) for longer than there was an Internet to blog on. There were these things called “Bulletin Board Systems” before that and I put my thoughts into textfiles on my BBS.

After that, I put up hand-linked hand-written HTML posts. Then actual blogging platforms began to appear, and all of a sudden there were 12 of the damn things, spread across different blogging platforms. I finally wrestled them down to just four platforms and 10 blogs, ditched three and created two new ones, and somewhere along that line some of them developed permanence.

So now I have nine, and a hosted vps with a couple of WordPress installations, a few custom domain names – you know, all the sort of stuff an old pensioner can’t afford but does anyway to maintain what amounts to a vanity press.

And Then Things Really Got Busy…

I got pensioned off with disability, met a lovely woman – online. And she came to visit me. And we got married and I moved interstate, planted vege gardens and moved them, replanted them and moved them, replanted them and moved them and replanted them.

And maybe I missed a move and replant in there. The thing is that I never got three consecutive seasons of crops out of them, and that’s even when we’ve been in this place for six years.

At some stage I started a small workshop in a 21ft container, then we sold the container and left the workshop gear under a camping gazebo for years until we could afford (and were allowed to) put up a 3x3m shed and I started to make a workshop in that. Had to take it down, chop it and reassemble in a different spot when we got a new landlord, got a 6x6m garage as a replacement for the dead shed, and were moving into it when…

My wife was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma and so the last first half of 2024 hasn’t been conducive to making noise right outside the bedroom to work on the new storage and workshop – when I wasn’t paralysed with fear that we were going to have to make our peace and it all to end. Now the chemo is over but we have a year or so of rehabilitating the damage the poisons have done, the immune system to repair itself…

The landlord wants the old (ALMOST NEW!) bastardised shed down but I still haven’t been able to fix up the garage to take what tools and materials remained undamaged by three years in all weathers – you get how these things go…

I’ve also always been the cook and kitchen person, and take on whatever I can in the way of laundry, gardening, pantry management, and looking after three (used to be four but one went to live with the sister-in-law during COVID and likes it better there) totally amazing and beautiful cats. Used to split that workload but for the moment it’s mostly me because my wife is so weakened by chemo that she simply can’t do more than survive from day to day.

Remember Those Nine Blogs?

I was never all that regular a blogger – sometimes three articles in a day, sometimes one a month… For a while, I almost stopped posting. Also, I stopped writing some of the blogs altogether and either deleted them or let them lapse. Also, despite being semi-retired (but with disability not just the good old golden handshake) it seemed that I found plenty to occupy myself with, as busy as when I was working, only in different endeavours.

Here’s the thing – I HAD the time to start them all back up in the last few years, and I did. I was kind of hoping they’d earn some income since I was writing between two and five articles a week for them but Google Ads sucks, and asking for donations feels wrong – and in any case has netted less than Google Ads has.

But blogs aren’t just a case of write, write, write. They need to be spaced out a bit to cover contingencies, that means scheduling, and that means announcing and publishing. And they are either “free” and worth every penny or cost more than I can afford to take out of our budget. So now I’m hoping the WordPress will let me aggregate the blogs into a nice magazine format and then maybe just maybe I can let WP take the load of scheduling, announcement, and newsletters etc. Wish me luck.