Rose-coloured the Third

Those who are newish here, or just do not monitor my movements on the internet very closely may not realize that you are actually reading Rose-coloured Mach III. The first Rose-coloured was a Blogspot blog I started back in 2007 when I was graduating from grad school and starting to think of myself as a writer in the world, in need of a public internet presence. It actually still exists at the link above and you can read the three years of archives if you care to. It was pretty good, in my humble opinion. I started it because my prior blog, 2001 to 2007, had been totally private, for just me and a few friends to keep in touch, and under a pseudonym—not helpful if you are trying to build a reputation as a writer on the internet. That one too actually still lives on on the internet, though I won’t link to it here, and it wasn’t called Rose-coloured. Rose-coloured the Second was born in 2010 when I started taking myself even more seriously as a writer and decided I would have my own URL and a DESIGNED (by Create Me This) website at rebeccarosenblum.com. I have been maintaining it up until this point alongside this newsletter though I don’t really blog there—the newsletter has become the blog—as a static site, with book links, bio links, and archives to past publications, plus archives of all those 15 years of blog posts (when Stuart at Create Me This made the site for me, he imported the Blogspot posts so the site would be complete).

Anyway, rebeccarosenblum.com died this week. it was a painful death, with a lot of back and forth with the tech support at the hosting company and multiple crashes. It was a pretty cute site, which Stuart designed just for me, with a TTC map as the top nav and a book cover and a soft pink colour scheme (rose-coloured). You can see a screen cap of it before it died and in the header photo. Of course, what it mainly had was 15 years worth of little thoughts and feelings and career highlights and basically diary entries from my life. Including this random shot of Mark right when we started dating that was on the page I was reading when the thing crashed for the last time:

Anyway, I fought pretty hard to save rebeccarosenblum.com but not as hard as I actually could have. After several tech support people told me they didn’t know what the problem was and one told me it was bot traffic, yet another told me the problem was malware and for $108 USD a year they could get rid of it. It was tempting, but I was already paying a lot per year to even have the badly malfunctioning site, and I didn’t actually believe the malware story.

Sad as I am to lose the site, I’m also kind of sad to lose what it represented. I guess I thought of it, when I got it all those years ago, as a kind of professionalism. I would invest money, time, creativity in marketing myself as a writer and as my career progressed, I would have more of those things and some would go into the website, making it better and nicer. As it turned out, I have less time and not as much money as I would like, and my professionalism as a writer is…dubious. I LOVE doing things like newsletters and websites and blogs, but am I marketing myself as a writer or am I just goofing off? A free self-maintaining service like beehiiv or Blogspot perhaps suits me better than the hosting service that really wanted me to do a lot of back-end dev work on my site, which even if I am technically smart enough to learn to do, I am just not going to invest the time to learn (and I might not be smart enought—we’ll never know).

Anyway, this is all very sad. I did download the archive—it’s over 3000 pages, so that’s fun. I can either upload it somewhere else that supports WordPress or clean it up (strip out the code) and donate it to my actual archive at Thomas Fisher, or pull out little random posts from the past to share here. All of which sounds like time and energy so we’ll see. Stay tuned.

In other news

Mark had a minor operation back in February—February 4—that involved cutting through his belly button. It actually wasn’t minor to me, as I was deranged with worry about it, until afterwards when I was completely destroyed by a terrible flu and unable to think about anything at all for several weeks, during which the responsibility for both our care became poor recovering Mark’s. Good thing his motto is “always fine.” Anyway, he was, but belly button healing is a mysterious thing, being somewhat shrouded, literally, in flesh. Given my theory, somewhat evident in this newsletter, that everything about Mark is fascinating, I tried to monitor it but was feverish, couldn’t really see and was banned from poking. Today, after a hiatus on this subject of a couple months, chatting idly at dinner:
RR: Hey, how’s your belly button?
MS: Fine.
RR: Like, fine, it feels totally normal, you never think about it?
MS: Yeah, pretty much.
RR: Can I look at it?
MS (sighs) Ok. (stands up from table, hikes up shirt)
RR: Huh. What’s that?
MS: What?
RR: There’s…stuff in there? I think there’s still stitches in there…that are just now healing? (hovers finger near belly button) But I’m not allowed to poke at you. You do it! You’ll be able to tell more easily if you’re hurting yourself.
MS: Um, ok. (rubs own belly button) Yes, it still feels a little scabby in there. Huh. (sits down and resumes eating chicken penne)

(later, RR sits in easy chair; MS walks by, bends over to hug her; RR attempts to hike up his shirt)
MS: You want to see my belly button again?
RR: Yes, please.
MS (sighs, straightens, lifts shirt)
RR: Can you turn a bit more towards the light, please?
MS: Really?
RR: I haven’t looked in ages. I didn’t know there was anything still going on here.
MS: It’s like one of those cable access channels: “I didn’t even know they still had that, but now I see there’s this fiddle hour, and yes, I WOULD like to watch that.”
RR (still staring at belly button) Which tells you everything you need to know about TV on PEI in the 1980s.
MS: Yes. The Maritime Good Time Fiddle Hour.
RR: Turn towards the light so I can see! You keep moving!
MS: (sighs) Thank you for your interest, anyway.