Every year we hit a post-holiday lull in our writing, but THIS year everything came to a screeching halt on December 6. We were hacked. Someone (cough! cough!) fell behind on the WordPress updates, and hackers inserted code to harvest Bitcoin through our visitors. Fortunately, our host quarantined the infected pages. Unfortunately, all you saw was a blank white screen with two lines of gibberish as a result.

I had no idea what to do and was already overwhelmed with another life event. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, as we said goodbye to my family in Orlando, we learned that my mother-in-law in Fort Lauderdale had had a massive stroke. So instead of returning to New York City, we found ourselves rushing to the ICU where we spent a week on an emotional roller coaster. Incredibly, Mr. Campbell’s mother is showing signs of improvement, but he and his sisters face difficult decisions about her care.

In the past, I’ve learned to trust that inspiration will hit again and we’ll keep going, but this time I wondered if it was time to let go of Hourglassy.

Then three things happened:

1. Leah told me she had a post ready to publish.

2. Someone who’s never commented on Hourglassy DM’d me on Facebook: “I love your Hourglassy website! I check in for new posts regularly, but all I get recently is an error message. Is Hourglassy gone? I sure hope not!”

3. Vania Benavides from VAB Media cleaned up the code and is getting us running again.

The silver lining is that we are FINALLY mobile-friendly. It was positively painful to read Hourglassy on a smartphone before this.

It’ll take a while to get the new theme where we want it to be, but isn’t this a LOT better than two lines of gibberish?

Taking a break on the beach after getting good news about my MIL. This is my new favorite shirt–polka dots that I found at a thrift store. But the gap in this Gap shirt keeps reminding me why I do what I do!