Oops – really meant to get something other than the standard ‘oh look – it’s a blog’ post up before I drew attention to myself. Meh – these things happen, and all that.

So, here I am in my new online home. How very odd. After four years in the other place, it feels quite strange to create a new identity, but at the same time, quite apt: I have just (about) finished my PhD (let’s not mention the corrections), I have produced the witchling (four months old today), and Mr. EW and I are getting to the end of the extension to the Witchery. Lots of new things are happening, and lots of things have changed since I started my last blog, so somehow, a new start doesn’t seem as wrong as it might have done had it been prompted solely by my feeling that various people might have been reading over my shoulder.

I may as well be reasonably open about that, incidentally – a few years back, I made the mistake of not clearing the history on a computer I was using when staying with my father, and, despite his remarkable lack of internet savvy, led him straight to me. Now, my relationship with my father is not the only reason for my having moved, but it is certainly a part of it, not least because of the way that things have – well, I was going to say that things have changed since he re-married in July, but the truth of it is that things haven’t changed at all, and, really, the things that he has said and done since that happened are more a case of proving true to form. He is not a bad man, and I do love him, but loving one’s relatives doesn’t necessarily mean liking them very much, and it would have been quite nice to have an outlet to work through some of the stuff he has put my way in recent weeks without feeling that he might read it. Mr. EW tells me that it would do him good to read the things that I honestly think, but I feel that if I have something to say to him, I should say it to his face, rather than to the internets. That said, the last time I wrote something deeply personal on my old blog, about the death of my mother and the resulting dilemma of what to do with her ashes (oh, how we laughed…), he took it upon himself to tell me what I could and couldn’t write about, and that the opinions of strangers couldn’t possibly matter to me at all on a subject so personal.

Now, I find the interweb offers a strange dynamic, and one which probably shouldn’t matter to me. Yet it does. I have made several good friends through my online existence, and friends whose opinions most definitely do matter to me, very much indeed. And sometimes, a reliable, yet uninvolved, audience has provided suggestions which only a certain distance made possible; just because you don’t know someone away from the tap, tap, tap of the net shouldn’t, as far as I can see, make sympathy and understanding impossible. So, if I want to go washing my dirty linen in public, as it were, provided I do so discretely and without naming names, as far as I can see, that’s my business, and reading a blog written by someone you know, when you know they would rather you didn’t, is tantamount to reading someone’s diary to tell them what they can and can’t write about in it.

Anyway. There it is.

And if you’d like to link to my new home, that would be lovely of you. As far as I can see, the Google-chi of various persons is suitably weak as to mean that I should be safe enough just having moved, though you’ll probably notice that most of my easily findable terms have now been changed; if you know my old name, or any of the bits and pieces that went with that alias, please don’t mention them! I shall be turning myself inside out learning bits and pieces about WordPress and so on shortly, and will gradually make myself more at home, I hope, but in the meantime I would just like to say thank you to Mr. McLean, who very kindly installed WordPress for me when I was covered in baby-sick and just couldn’t get it to work.

(Oh, and as an aside, does anyone have a good suggestion as to why I appear to be unable to resize my fonts here? I’m using the CSS file, but making changes to the fontsize specification doesn’t seem to make any difference, and, well, it’s quite visually challenging, that small, isn’t it?)