My long break from blogging and the internet in general has been mostly due to a crashed laptop. Once crashed, I took my laptop into Mark and Dani's in Santa Eulalia who charged me €30 for the privilege of wiping all my data off (including all photos, mostly unsaved and unprinted) and loading a fake copy of Thai Microsoft onto it. A 'friend' then took it away saying he'd fix it and returned it with German Microsoft. That was pretty typical of this friend, who I will say no more about. I then waited three months for the correct HP recovery discs to arrive from the UK. You would not believe how hard it is for HP's organisational structure to pick up three discs, put them in an envelope and post them to someone who dares to live in a foreign country. How many people in their call centre in India I spoke to I do not know!
Anyway, whinge over. I've lost a lot of important things, which will now need to be recovered, but I did benefit from my break from cyberspace. I worked very hard on my shop just in time for the season to start and it's now rammed with stock, more organised and more profitable. I also made more things than I would otherwise have done and, to be honest, enjoyed my life more.
The worst thing is losing the photos. Because of that, I have realised that the best thing about having run this blog has been that it has meant I saved my photos online in a safe place. Unfortunately it will probably not be possible to print them off but at least I can look at them.
I now want to try to re-build my photo stock so Lottie has a photo album in later life. I've realised how important they are. I am also going to stop writing on my blog, unless I have something I desperately want to talk about, as I no longer want my life to be made public. Maybe one day I will write a book, auto-biographical or fiction, but for now at least Lottie and I will be just like everyone else. The blog was started in order for me to diarise my progress in setting up my shop and to get moral support from complete strangers at a time when I felt pretty lonely. I don't feel lonely anymore and I don't feel I need constant moral support; the pressure is off. I also feel I am not an exciting or interesting enough person to sustain a blog indefinitely.
From now on, My Life in Ibiza will really be My Life in Ibiza in Photos. This will encourage me to do what I feel is important: take more photos. I hope that's ok with you. Thank you to everyone who left supportive and encouraging comments; you helped me a lot.