A Decade Of Nonsense: Part 6

Travel took me a lot of places in '08. Here's a shot from Deer Valley, Utah.

2009 was a year of really high highs and really depressed lows. I was hither, thither, and non but somehow managed to keep up with the blog here.

It's really hard for me to properly put this time , (including the last end of 2008), into proper perspective. I was really blessed to be where I was and to go where I went, but deep down inside I wasn't comfortable. I wasn't even sure what was going on in many cases, but I muddled through it, and somehow things worked out despite of me. Travel was a curse and a blessing. I was gone too much from my perspective and I really, really despise flying.

A big change was becoming the sole proprietor of TNI.com after a protracted, vague, and overly difficult transaction with the former owner. Not only that, but business connections, business contracts, and even the photo hosting site was either not transferred or lost forever due to incompetence on the former owners part.  But that really didn't affect this blog....

All throughout 2008 I was writing a separate paragraph here and there entitled "Gravel Grinder News". It was usually a part of Friday News And Views, but not always. In 2009 I continued that here and it was becoming more and more apparent that it deserved it's own space. I had been messing around On Blogger with a Trans Iowa History site and what I wnted to do there wasn't easy on the Blogger platform. Someone suggested I look at Wordpress and I got along with that quite well. So, the T.I.History site was ditched on Blogger but I still had the page sitting there in case I needed to refer back to it. Well, all that to say that I figured I could rename the Blogger site "Gravel Grinder News" and separate the gravel stuff from here. By late '09 I had that up and running.

Daryl Pals stands near my "Dirty Blue Box" '91 Honda Civic wagon that saw a lot of gravel action in '09

 

 

 

 

So, I had this blog, a Trans Iowa History blog, Gravel Grinder News, and Twenty Nine Inches. I also made an incredibly bad decision to hook up with a former Crooked Cog Network blogger to start "The Cyclistsite.com". I was pretty stoked at the beginning, then about a month and a half after this individual said that they would help me with it, they suddenly bailed out. Thankfully Grannygear, my new found cohort from SoCal, stepped up and saved me from getting egg on my face, but this was another personal downer at the time. Oh, and another Big Wheeled Ballyhoo fiasco on top of that toward the end of '09 was icing on a not very tasty cake.

At any rate, the bottom line was that by some miracle I made posts here on an almost daily basis anyway. Personally, I was a wreck, but "professionally", things were mostly great and I got to do some incredible things I would have never gotten to do otherwise. I got to meet a lot of really great people. I was blessed, but I had strung myself out too far. It was unwise, and I knew it. After this point, there was some pruning planned and it took several years to accomplish it.