Now the past few days have been a little weird for other respects as Max has been out the most and even though there’s been work that he’s supposed to have been doing, because we all need to do the online work he focused more on things in the house.
However, he’s been a little iffy on writing on the blogs because he considers himself ‘stupid’ and also because I’m mostly the one who writes and even though this blog in particular is about all of us he figures that he shouldn’t.
So, I’m figuring that I will do an intro for everyone or invite them to introduce themselves and we can do things here the way we do on our livejournal which is if different alters write the entry is tagged with them. Perhaps we will do separate “pages” for each of us. I’ve been planning on changing the layout on this blog for a while but it got put off with the computer issues, and then for other things.
I’ve been somewhat forced to change the LJ layout because something screwy was going on with the code. So, we’ll see what I can come up with for here, after I get a couple of client projects off the ground.

Well, that’s what I’ve continued to do with my blogs. I censor myself and hesitate about writing about things and then wonder why I don’t have things to write about and am struggling to gain readership or engage anyone in conversations. These things are not good to do. I should just write and not worry about what people will think, then there’s a much greater chance that people will find things useful, because they’ll be better able to understand and potentially relate to experiences that are going on, and topics that I’m writing about. Why should I worry about discussing heathen things or tarot related things on a blog that I set up to discuss those very things. If people don’t like the subject matter then they shouldn’t have been reading a blog on heathenism in the first place.

At the same time, this is a place to discuss aspects of multiplicity, and other sorts of potential oddness that is gathered in with that. So, I shouldn’t worry about that either; but this is the way of it.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to stick to my guns and actually follow through with that and provide much more useful content in the not-to-distant future and beyond.

I put them back into the big computer three times over the past month, and I don’t want to do it again, but at least if I’m putting them in somewhere online I know that I shouldn’t have to do them again unless something happens directly to the source of the online program.

Within minutes of me asking on twitter I was recommended Google Reader by several sources, and I decided to check it out, and I’ve started filling things in. I love the way that it works. I also like that I can just type in a website and it finds the feed for me instead of me having to browse all over the site for the source.

Now, I’m just left with trying to find all the blogs that I was reading. I used to have at least forty sites in my feed reader, from friends sites likeMy Single Mom Life or Footprints on the Moon to more commonly known sites such as The Customer is Not Always Right and Fail Blog. It’s hard to track them all down again given the way my memory is, often I remember posts or the person’s name but not the actual website address. I’m sure I’ll get there, and perhaps I’ll find some new nifty sites on the way.

So, I feel I should restablish the business twitter and actually use it. Perhaps if I set it up with Echofon or something else I’ll be able to remember to log in and tweet at least once or twice a day about business related things, and tarot and heathen related things to keep things going. Of course I wouldn’t have been able to see any of that possibility had I not begun to streamline my online life.

I may yet be contacted by the FBI about the situation, I suppose it depends how many people he was able to scam before Paypal noticed and got in touch with my wonderful host drak.net who locked everything down, about ten-fifteen minutes total, but that’s a long time in the internet world, and an even
longer time while they went through everything everywhere with a fine tooth comb and checked for backdoors and other issues of scripts and made sure everything was clean, and I went through everything on this computer and made sure there wasn’t a virus or something here.

As it happens the time it turns out that the malicious scripts were initially put in my site corresponds almost exactly with the last time that my computer went down and had to go in the shop, the beginning of September.

Everything I’ve looked at indicates that things are clean now, but I’m still extremely paranoid about everything and at the same time I feel violated, because they were in my sites, they built themselves a subdomain and an email and I did not see they were there for THREE MONTHS, even though during that time my site wound up sending out several hundred spam emails and got locked down. I thought I had caught everything, but they were hiding out in my shades subdomain, which I haven’t updated in over a year, so I didn’t see them, and then they waltzed in and used me to attempt to scam people out of money.

I’m extremely grateful to both Jen at drak.net and Steve at Liquid Web who not only managed to restore my site to working order within two days, but were able to do so without having to nuke and pave the entire thing and me having to start over from almost scratch in case my site back ups had viruses or malicious script in them.

They’ve enabled me to keep a good portion of my livelihood going, and that is wonderful and I’m eternally grateful and in their debt.

I found out last night after I got home from work that I had won the contest! I’m really looking forward to receiving this product because I know that Kat would not recommend something, let alone conduct a contest about something which didn’t work. I previously picked up Kaboom Scrub Free which she had recommended and it has been absolutely brilliant for our toilets, which were horribly rust-stained even when we first moved in.

I have a new layout. A new name. A new site name. New link categories. All kinds of things. I even have a new about page, which I encourage everyone to check out, because you may not want to stick around any more. If you do, however, that’s great, and I’d really like to get to know you.

So, what’s going on? You may find yourself wondering. Why all these changes? Well, some of it is what I touched on the other day, which is that I realized I had a RIDICULOUS amount of bloggy and internetty things that just needed to get shelved, but several of them I didn’t want to shelve because they were kinda cool, but they couldn’t stand alone. To that end those blogs have merged together. My pagan/paranormal blog which was having a hard time, and my Joy Infection blog which was also having a hard time are now one called A Joyful Path and I would love to see people moseying on over to sign up to participate in the weekly Joy Infection meme.

Then my mental health blog, which some of you may not even have realized I had because I really didn’t talk about it all that much has merged in with this one. This was something that I have been debating about for quite some time. I felt stifled but I also felt up until recently (which may probably have a good deal to do with some potentially positive steps which I’ve gone through therapeutically and mentally) that I really couldn’t talk about things that were going on, that it would make me anathema. So, instead a lot of things withered and began to die, including my ability to do any sort of bloggy things.

I see this as a combination of factors: I was once again not being true to myself (or selves as is more appropriate really), I was suffering severe depression because I had been without meds for that since August of last year and hadn’t realized what a hideous space I was in, several of my selves didn’t want to be here any more and I was spread entirely to thin across the blogsphere and horribly drained by that.

So these past few days while I’ve been horribly sick. I felt it was a good time to start chopping away at some of the things which have been tying me up and down and the best way to start that was to hack away some of the blogs that I didn’t use.

Initially I started small. I deleted new blogs I had signed up for that I wasn’t using or was just mirroring other blogs on such as dreamwidth accounts and insanejournal accounts. Then I unsubscribed from several mailing lists I was on that were supposed to be “supportive” but were just bogging me down with other people’s drama and whining.

Then I tackled the big things which was combining blogs together. The last of which is taking “Echoes of My Selves” which was on ceruleanechoes.com backing it up and transferring portions of it over here. Some parts I’m just going to re-write as I explain to old readers who are sticking with me, and potential new readers who are going “who is this Faith person? what happened to Echo and her blog?” and I think I’ve gone on quite long enough with this post at the moment.

So, my explanation of who I am will go into another post. For now the simplest way to explain is that Ami isn’t exactly here any more. She, in a sense, evolved and reincarnated within her own head. I have Multiple Personalities. Ami, while being a nickname was also the name of one of my “alters” (which is the clinically acceptable term) and she integrated with two other alters, and out of that I came. My name if Faith.

We are not “cured” but we’re a lot more functional now. We’re a lot less nervous and paranoid and jumpy, which is a very good thing. There are still other alters who may never integrate. However in order to keep things going here. We all felt it was a necessary step to come out of “the closet” and stop hedging, hesitating and hiding.

Please if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask. We do have an “FAQ” which we’ll be transferring over, that several friends on a parenting forum asked when I talked to them about the multiplicity and that may answer some of your questions, but I’m on the inside, not the outside and would love to hear other questions to help me flesh things out and clear things up for anyone who happens to stop by.

Thank you to those of you who are sticking with us.

No wonder updating anything online is so daunting!

I’ve been cutting and trimming things here and there, but not enough. I’m not closing this blog! No! It’s way too good to me, and I’ve had it for so long! and it’s also the primary account holder for my domain, so if I close it that’s a $50 transfer fee because I have lifetime hosting.

But I am going to be condensing down several of the blogs and bringing their content slowly over here, and also onto one of the other blogs, probably The Silver Path Blog (which really needs a better name) but hey this blog has just been “ami-chan.net” for as long as I’ve had it.

ANYWAY, what this means is that I’ll be talking a lot more about my mental health and goings on with that here. I’ve glanced across it several times but things have tended to be very hush-hush. However, I’m pretty open about my “craziness” in my personal life, so why not here too?

As I said to a good friend (Huushiita) just before: hiding is tiring…and I’m endeavoring to take stress OUT of my life, so I should just stop.

I expect this means that this site will get a re-vamp and a bit of a new layout. I do like the header image on the main blog that I’m closing down and would like to keep it in some fashion.

I worked on a couple of LJ layouts for various people. There’s one I don’t have a screen shot off yet because the client and I are still tweaking a few things here and there.

The first one uses pictures from Ruroni Kenshin; and the second was a re-work I did for a friend. Her boyfriend customized the picture of her and then I made it into a banner so she could more easily put it into a layout and installed the code for her.

The others I’ve done are sites that I use myself; my personal blog and then two new layouts for the Tarot Business site. All of these layouts use commissioned artwork from Dusk Fire Art. Lady Death has been used in another layout before this but in this layout she’s been cropped a little bit so that the blog takes centerpiece rather than the header. Given she did such great work on my avatar for the tarot site it seemed only right that with Kore joining the site Dusk do her avatar as well so that they matched and so the header for Look Beyond Mirrors uses that. When Kore and I decided that we would be changing the business name and site to The Silver Path Tarot it was best to re-do the header so that it was more Path and less Mirror, and those same avatars have been used in that but the background was changed.

What do you guys use to read your blog feeds? I’m interested in checking out a variety of options given I wasn’t all that happy on the way Thunderbird processed the feeds anyway.

Thank you!