Dear Diary:

Weather today -- warm
Mood today -- very tired
Fly count for yesterday -- 0
HF -- 11%

My site is, once again, in a shambles. I have no one to blame but myself. Can't lay it on Fishnet's doorstep this time. :) Those of you who read this diary frequently know that the last two weeks have been sheer hell for me. This culminated a couple days ago in the end of my relationship with Rudy (or so I believed at the time). In grief, I took my site down. I'm sure you're wondering 'what gives? Why take the site down because a relationship ended?' Well, that's hard to explain. Very few people know what this site *really* means to me. It's far more than a place to show off my HTML skills or collect pretty graphics. It's more than my diary, it's more than the total of the pages. I began this site in August of 1996 as a means of healing. It was a catharsis. And it was the first and only thing that really caught and held my interest after a series of horrible events caused me to detach myself from life completely.

Through this site, I began to re-engage with life a little bit at a time. I found something I actually cared about. If you think I exaggerate, let me assure you I do not. For nearly three years I didn't care if I lived or died or about anything within my life... not my husband, not my birds, not even my son. I existed as a completely empty shell, experiencing close to no emotion. I was unable to give or receive love in any form. Then I became involved with Rudy. He awoke some passion in me, some life. As our relationship grew, so did this site. And this site became an intergal part of my relationship with Rudy, my gift to him if you will. Though he isn't mentioned on every page, there are a number of pages that were designed specifically for him. Others will visit these pages and enjoy them, as well, but only Rudy knows their true depth and meaning. And he has contributed his own wit and wisdom to several pages, all of which you will find in his subdirectory.

Perhaps you can understand that when I believed the relationship to be over, I felt this site's existence needed to be terminated. I felt myself going back into detachment mode and dispassionately took the entire site down... it's surprising how quickly that can be accomplished considering how long it takes to build it up. It was my intention to delete all of it, every word, every graphic, not only from my server, but from my hard drive as well. Rudy asked me if he could take over ownership of it, and since I really didn't care what the hell happened to it, I agreed. I began FTPing the files to his directory, where they would reside until he decided what to do with them.

In the meantime, over the past couple days, Rudy and I have spent many hours working through the problems that existed between us. I now have considerable hope for our future together, though I'm sure our survival right now is tenuous at best. The single greatest thing that is hurting us is the fact that we're 10,000 miles apart. We desperately want and need to be together. But the time is not yet right for that to occur, and we've committed ourselves to hanging in there one day at a time until it can be the right time.

It is, perhaps, foolish of me to tie my site up emotionally with a relationship. But that is what's happened, and for better or worse, that's the way it is. I'll be rebuilding the site over the next few days. I hope you'll check back periodically to see how things progress.