Today has been a little stranger than usual…I seem to be in the doldrums. Held inside by the heat, humidity, and the biting insects when I really want to be outside. Not that being inside today has been tough. It’s just been quieter than I am used to…Everyone is out, and that isn’t normal for around here.

I finally managed to make it through most of the weeks worth of podcasts that I missed while this computer was out of commission. The last one in the que was my old buddy Felder Rushing with his Gestalt Gardener Radio podcast from Mississippi Public Radio. Before that there were the Three Wine Guys, Speaking of Faith, The Writer’s Almanac, The Splendid Table, Buddhist Geeks, Countdown, Rachel Maddow, and Meditation Oasis. It feels good to be caught up with my world again.

I saw while reading Dick Eastman in my reader feeds today that Yahoo is closing down GeoCities…It was where I set up my first website way back in December 1998. That original post has been ported to three different websites since that original month long effort to get my genealogy research online. That initial effort of uploading over 2500 html pages over a dial-up modem was not fun. Making changes to the data required replacing every page so I tended to just update the site twice a year at best. And that was why when Yahoo bought GeoCities I got the boot in the fall of 2003…And I’ve held it against them ever since. But now I’m years ahead of the game so I guess I can forgive and move on…Truth be told, I was surprised that GeoCities was still out there. I don’t think I’ve seen a GeoCities address in a really long time and I can remember when it seemed like the majority of the personal sites in existance where housed there…

So my history on the web goes something like this…

• December 1998; Geocities Genealogy website
• January 2001; Blogger Blog (never regular)
• January 2004; Moved from Geocities to Rootsweb FreePages for my genealogy website.
• In 2005 and 2006 I had started reading a number of blogs originating from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. That led me to starting North Carolina Mountain Dreams on Blogger in May of 2006.
• During the run up to the 2006 elections and for a while afterwords I started a second blog on Blogger where I let my political demons run wild. Rants against the Bush Administration were regular attractions. I called my political site Blues From The Red Side.  That site was  moved into my spin off from North Carolina Mountain Dreams, this site Coffee Muses.
• During the many convoluted meanders of defining myself on the web, the two original domains I claimed in August of 2000, Gary-Boyd.com and Boyd-Family.net have been used to house differing aspects of my on-line life. Boyd-Family.net has been forwarded to whatever site housed my genealogy and family history pages until I finally set them up on my shared hosting account.
• Coffee Muses began in 2007 when I discovered that I was spending more time blogging about life and Texas than about the North Carolina Mountain Dreams I still have. The name came from a tag I was using regularly to categorize my morning muses before heading out the door to work. When I checked and the domain name was available I jumped on it and CoffeeMuses.com became my main, daily home on the web.
• August 2008: Moved my genealogy site to The Next Generation and my hosting plan. North Carolina Mountain Dreams moved to it’s own hosted site. I added GaryBoydPhotograpy.com and VirginiaMountianDreams.com to the growing family of domains I use to house my varied interests.

And today I am sitting here wondering where it’s all going to lead me…