Happy birthday to me

Some of you may have noticed the sudden disappearance of my Cold Fury websty this week, an annual phenomenon that usually occurs when I forget to pay for the domain name registration each year. It's a real mental glitch I have going on with this, I admit. I registered the CF name and started the blog in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, six days after the fact on 9/16. Oughta be easy enough to remember that, right? And yet...here we all are. Again.

But this year is a little different. For the last couple-three years, I've been pondering shifting the domain name responsibilities over to Hosting Matters, the company upon whose servers the blog has been perched for years now. HM's proprietress and web designer extraordinaire, Stacy Tabb, is an old and highly esteemed chum from the earliest days of the warblogosphere; the whole crew at HM are great folks, and my trust in them is absolute. Besides all that, HM's fee for the domain reg is about half what I've been paying for lo, these many years. The only thing that's kept me from pulling the trigger before now is the several days of downtime required while the mysterious Internet Gnomes see to the propagation and percolation and whatever else goes on in the most secret caverns of the Innarnuts.

But I dunno, seems to me that since I'm down already, due mostly to having been extremely busy the past week, now might just be the time to make the change granting full behind-the-scenes control of CF to Hosting Matters for good. Sorry for any anxiety my disappearance might have caused anybody. The funny thing is, I received several emails toot sweet from CF lifers who already know the drill and wanted to remind me of this year's Senior Moment. I'll keep everyone posted here and at Daily Pundit as to further developments; right now, I'm leaning pretty heavily towards just going ahead and making the HM switch, frankly. There's also going to be some news forthwith about that CF podcast I mentioned a couple months back, too. Many thanks once again to Francis for the posting privileges here. Lastly, happy eighteenth (!) birthday to ye olde Cold Fury blog; long may she wave.

Oh, and what is it I've been so all-fired busy with this week, you ask? Well, on Monday, it was this:

That's me, one of the at-large members of the Gaston County School District, and my young 'un Madeleine, at the presentation ceremony honoring MJ for having won statewide in the Proudest Kid In (insert name of county here) County essay contest. From here, it's on to Raleigh, where she'll be duly recognized in the NC Senate. I told her after all was said and done the other night that it's too bad there isn't a Proudest Dad In Gaston County contest, because I'd win that thing going away. She liked that.