Not the useful kind scientists collect. Or Brent Spiner’s character from Star Trek.

Due to technical tomfoolery, all of the posts on my blog post-2008, as well as all my page texts, have been wiped. The blog entries all still exist on my LiveJournal, fortunately, but the import function on WordPress doesn’t want to play well with it. The important thing is that they’re still around somewhere.

My hosting service was unable to recover much of the lost data, and the rest falls to me, because I wasn’t terribly diligent about making backups of all my posting and pages via WordPress (since it’s as simple as clicking one button and saving an XML file, I have no excuse beyond laziness.) So, back up your blogs as often as you back up your word files, folks. That’s the lesson here.

In a way, it’s kind of nice to have a fresh start, and I’m glad all of a sudden that 2012 has been a year of, shall we say, light posting for me. Reading back through some old posts made me realize how much less critical I used to be about what I posted, for good or ill. Some posts made me cringe with the amount of overshare, some made me smile because I liked being that off-the-cuff, posting about random junk like what was on my iPod and my birthday party from 2008, where a crazy bartender threatened to tear up my temporary ID card…

Lots of what I posted about back then has been broken out into my DIY/life blog, Restoration Girl (which is also sorely in need of updates.) For the rest, I think I got overwhelmed. Life is much different than it was in 2008. I had a bit of blogging performance anxiety, and it got easier and easier to not post.

But I miss interacting with readers online. I miss that daily record of daily stuff that serves to remind me when times are hard that I’ve done it before. I’ve handled bad moments and finished books and gotten off my ass and done stuff and been places.

I know this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve promised to blog more, but this time I’m not doing out of a sense of guilt. I’m doing it because I genuinely miss you guys. I may not show up every day, or even every week, but I will show up and I won’t let the place go dark for months on end.

Consider this the “soft open”…I’ll make a real post about what I’ve been up to soon. Ish. Because man, do I have a lot of turkey-encrusted dishes to do.