How long have I been blogging? I think it was around 1999 when I started my first blog, Bedaville. Bedaville was a happy yellow journal, where I rambled on about my love life, and about hanging out on Mansfield Ave. in Atlanta with all of my theatre friends, and about living with Robert.

The second evolution of the journal came with a black background, and a design that made you scroll right to read the entries. I envisioned my blog wrapping itself all the way around the Internet. It was probably the most annoying website to look at in the history of the world wide web, and I quickly abandoned it for traditional margins, but kept the black background (how hip is THAT!), and even tried my first stylesheet implementation. It was pretty much a disaster of a design, but carried me through more babbling about my love life, and even hosted a graphic novel called Camp Jane that I would love to revive, and repost if I could ever find it on backup disk after several years involving several trans-pacific moves.

The third evolution involved me archiving all of the previous evolutions because I got married, and who really wants their husbands and inlaws to read all about my love life, and about how Robert and I drank champagne in the middle of the week, and spent our Saturdays doing nothing but sitting in the back yard listening to Bossa Nova and talking about boys. The site was still BLACK , but had cool pictures of Baz and I in love, and told all about exotic trips and running an advertisting agency. It made life sound extremely glamorous and unrealistic. The writing was absolutely horrible!

Then we moved to Hawaii, and after a brief term spent with a really sappy Beth and Basil, loving in Paradise theme, I registered my own domain name, and started writing on DarnLucky.com. I started using a blogging system, and stopped creating HTML pages by hand every single time I wrote an entry. And I think my writing started to get better, and my enthusiasm definitely improved. DarnLucky went through it’s first redesign this past spring, and what you see now is sort of like BethBerry v6.o1.

I’ve survived blogging about boys, black backgrounds, drunken blogging, and blogging in the labor room. But something happened to me for the first time in blog history last month. My laptop died, I got a new computer, and forgot my blog password. I tried every possible username and password that I’ve used in the past 10 years of computing. I looked through old setup documents that I often e-mail myself when I’m putting up a new site or setting up a new database. I went back and tried every combination again and again and again, and failed each time. I was locked out of my own BLOG, for Pete’s sake! I was reduced to a reader of my own memoirs, with no ability to edit or embellish the content!

It was one of the hardest couple of weeks of my slightly exaggerated life. Until today. It hit me. While I was staring at my login screen, trying to pump myself up for another round of “Guess your password!”, my eyes were drawn to a simple underlined link below the password submit button.

Forgot Password?

Why, yes. Yes, I have forgotten my password. And I hung my head in shame as I typed in my e-mail address, and was instructed to check my e-mail to retrieve my password reminder. I went from hipster technology mama to blogging dumbass in a nano second. Finally, it’s hip to be square, and suddenly I’m getting rounder.

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