This weekend I’m going to totally re-design WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com.  Are y’all reading in your RSS readers, or do you actually click through to the page?

If I can get the scanner to work, I’m thinking about hand drawing the new site design.  Sound dumb??

I wrote here that I was thinking about writing to the woman that murdered my nine-year old classmate.  Well, I did it.  And I’ll keep you posted on if she responds.

Sidenote: That last post wasn’t a desperate cry for attention – I didn’t want people to comment “PLEASE! Don’t stop blogging,” which kind of happened.  It was just an honest observation about how those I-should-blog-this moments have turned into I-should-Tweet-this.

2009 was a long year, and I went through quite a bit.  Here are ten things that have stuck with me.

10. Men don’t make passes at boys that wear glasses.

9. Anyone can be a Warhol.

8. I look better with hair.

7. Once you move away, it’s never the same.

6. Magicians never give away the trick.

5. I need to travel more.

4. Blackberries blow.

3. In Mike Lawson Ro-Sham-Bo, Paper beats Computer every time.

2. Don’t dream it.  Be it.

1.  No matter what anyone tells you, insulin is important.

In the spirit of the end-of-the-year top ten lists, I’ve compiled a few top tens for WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com. Here’s the first.  The Top Ten Most Commented Blog Posts of 2009.

10. This is the one with my 12 of 12 from February 2009. (7 comments) – When I post 12 photos from the 12th day of the month, it seems to generate quite a few comments.

9. This is the one about Carl Karcher’s daughter. (7 comments) – A funny story about the time I met a fast-food mogul’s daughter on a plane.

8. This is the one about doctors. (8 comments) – Needed some friendly advice about choosing a doctor.

7. This is the one with my 12 of 12 from May 2009. (9 comments) – Another 12 of 12 post.

6. This is the one where I recover everything. (9 comments) – The resolution to some stupid hosting issues.

5. This is the one where I get a Zippo lighter. (10 comments) – I was so excited to get a free Zippo…but I have absolutely no use for it.

4. This is the one with a 12 of 12 for October 2009. (11 comments) – The 12 of 12 posts are pretty popular with the comments.

3. This is the one that you can steal. (11 comments) – I couldn’t figure out if I should tuck in my shirt or not, so I posted 2 pictures and asked for advice.  Wouldn’t that make an amazing new website?

2. This is the one where I start over. (12 comments) – This was an angry post when I thought that I lost my entire archive of blog posts.  I blogged about and tweeted about how much I hated my hosting company, and was contacted by a customer service person to resolve everything (and to shut up the negative google hits).

1. This is the one about possible Twitter avatars. (16 comments)  – When you ask for advice, they give it.  In this post I made a few new Twitter avatar options and asked for input.  The record should show that I no longer use the avatar that I made for this post, and reverted back to the old one.    P.S. Follow me on Twitter.

I feel kind of ashamed to admit this, but I’ve been cheating on you.

You may remember that I’ve been teaching children how to blog, and I’ve set up a blog over there where I post stupid things.  Nothing personal.

It’s not you.  It’s me.

I’ve just been blogging at WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com for so long, and I needed to step out of that comfort zone and try something new.  I hope we can work this out…I still love you and hope that we can stay together.

Guess who the featured blogger of the week is over at The Diabetes OC website?  If you guessed Wilford Brimley, you’d be close…but not correct.

The featured blogger this week is me!

I put together a few posts.  My quick introduction with a anecdotal story about me in the 3rd grade is up right now.  I’ll also be writing about when I was diagnosed with diabetes, and living with an expensive chronic illness and being uninsured.

The “OC” in The Diabetes OC doesn’t stand for “Orange County” like I have been programmed to believe.  It actually stands for “Online Community” and the site was created by people that are living with diabetes and want to share their life with the world.

The website is currently ran by Gina Capone.

I personally manage a couple of websites. The list starts with, of course, this one. And I also do most of the technical stuff for SweetTalk.org.  And all of that got a little more complicated last week when I started a blogging club with children (ages 5-13).

Now I’ve got my hands on 20 blogs.  All running WordPress.  I’ll probably be posting a few links once some of the kids get good content posted.

I’m also looking for any Phoenix area bloggers to come speak to the group in March.  Pass this on to anyone you know in Phoenix.

Yesterday morning I got a call from a guy named Alon at GoDaddy.  He told me that his job was to search the web and to find people talking about GoDaddy…and if they had issues, to help them find a resolution.

The guy at technical support for GoDaddy that originally “helped” me and instructed me to delete my database did not leave good notes, so I had to explain most of the story to him.

He was really helpful and had some of their tech guys send me a backup of my database (that included my last 2 years of blog content) for free…even though their tech support had instructed me that it would cost $75.

Then my boyfriend sat up all night figuring out how to merge the old content with the new content.  And he was successful!

All of my content is back!

Changes are coming.

When GoDaddy raped me and stole my money a few weeks ago (CAUTION: NEVER USE GODADDY), and when all of my content was lost, I received this strange gift: a blank slate.

In the past I’ve lost focus of what I wanted to do with this website, and that is to simply tell stories.  I may occasionally post a kid using his middle finger or a random Photoshop project, but I’m going back to why I started WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com.

This is a storytelling blog.

I’m still upset that I lost all of my content.  Especially those 11 posts that were bringing in hundreds of Stumbleupon users and Google searchers each day.  Since the screw-up that is entirely GoDaddy’s fault, I have had trouble getting back into the groove.  How do you start writing the third act when you know you just lost your first two in a technical hiccup?

But I’m moving past that.

I have created a backup system of my database that is emailed to me every night in case GoDaddy screws something up again.  And I’m doing a little editing of the design here too.

I got the title of this blog from a Joan Didion short story called “On Keeping a Notebook.” [pdf version available here]

In the short story Didion writes about how she sometimes has trouble remembering what really happened and what could have happened.  And I sometimes struggle with this same distinction.  Didion wrote:

I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t
that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

So this blog will serve as a place for me to tell my stories (sometimes peppered with a few embellishments).  This blog serves the same purpose as Didion’s notebooks.