New Name, New Design...Older Me

OOPS! This morning my subscribers received two posts via email that look like, well, the Latin gobbledygook that they are. I haven’t been hacked – I’m rebranding and that was an oopsie!

On the bright side, at least I know the emails subscriptions work! Keep reading for some news that is beyond exciting for me!

– _{Jenn, proving that she still doesn’t know what she’s doing because there is a random pear in this graphic. Go with it.}

It’s been a LONG time since I have posted.

Partly because 2022 was a shit-show. And 2021. And 2020, if we’re gonna be honest.

The other reason is because Momma On The Rocks has been held together by bubble gum, pipe cleaners, and a whole lot of hope for far too long now. Unfortunately, I’d been quoted big money to fix it, and while I really, really intended to get it updated – I just couldn’t find the bandwidth to do it.

Time got…lets just say it REALLY got away from me.

I am not technically minded and trying to fix the website broke a friend who has skills.

We tried to update it all the bits and bobs in December 2021 that make it run, and it broke. As in, I had a screen full of utter gobbledygook.

And I panicked.

This is how I felt.
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

So I’ve been staring at it, and somewhere in my head I heard “if you add to it while it’s in staging form you’ll have to redo those posts manually. And the it turned to total avoidance. Because I manage my trauma well.

ANYWHO…thirteen months later, I decided to tackle it again and either fix it or just dump the whole thing. Maybe start over. However, thanks to my utter lack of understanding of what I’m doing, it turns out that all I had to do was install a new theme.

I don’t know whether to feel stupid or grateful.

Probably both.

Hopefully today we’ll get the physical -erm, digital? database moved to a brand new URL:

www.jenncaffeinated.com

It’s the same old blog, minus ALLLLLLL the mom-blog type posts, the ugly formatting, and omg, the terrible, terrible fonts and font colors. I’m digging the clean lines, the cleaner font (hopefully easier to read), and the cooperativeness of the website on mobile devices.

AREN’T I FANCY?!

I’m not sure where I’m headed with this thing. My then-littles are now teens and so I won’t be writing about them (and definitely not without consent, if I do), and I’m not really interested in sponsored posts any more.

I’ll be honest: I miss when we used to just write.

And I guess that’s what I’m going to do with this – just write. Get back to my roots a bit. I’ve lost a lot of my funny over the past 6 years, and I need to reclaim my Erma Bombeck mantra:

“If you can’t make it better, at least you can laugh at it.”
– Erma Bombeck

This blog was created way back in 2008 (!) as a way to find the humor in everyday life (and keep my sanity) as I transitioned from a fast paced career to one as a full-time mom. I want to keep doing that – to find the humor, be it light or dark, in life – along with sharing much of the things that help me get through it, like books, and travel, memes and TikToks, and coffee.

Definitely coffee.

Some excuses other things in my life:

I have a few books currently in first draft stages, and my 2023 goal is to actually get brave and submit to other journals and things like a real writer. (I am one! Have you bought the anthology that my teen and I are both published in? I have a lot stuffed in a back closet, too, so holler if you want a copy.)

I’m also the uniform mom for the high school marching band, which is an unpaid full-time job during the summer and in marching season, and I’m the percussion mom, which means I drive around the snare drums and organize things from time to time for the percussionists. And I’m volunteering. And

Maybe it’s stupid nostalgia, but I’m not ready to give up on my teenaged blog. (*It’s going to be FIFTEEN THIS YEAR. Holy shit. Next year it will be old enough to drive!) I think I’ll let it hang around awhile longer, although like most teenagers, most of the time it will be in its room with TikTok, books and video games.

I hope you hang around for a while longer and enjoy a new format with actual new content. It’s a new name, but it’s still the same overanxious, sarcastic me. (Sorry, not sorry.) ALSO – if you are seeing this on Facebook and you unsubscribed (as one would do) because it looked like spam, please go resubscribe. The next task is to fix the subscription so everything goes out once a week.