This blog is the most recent. Not that I’ve blogged much lately.
After Afghanistan and the Wordpress debacle, we decided as a family to move to Germany. This was outside of our comfort zone, so the blog was renamed. Then once we returned to the US, it became Life Back Inside the Comfort Zone. Only, it was not as comfortable as it once was. Herbert Hoover, our only engineer President, once made a statement about Americans who lived abroad. “The American is always an alien abroad. His own heart is in his own country, and yet there is less and less a niche for him when he returns.” My family and I found this to be true.
So after 2 years of living back in the US we said, we loved Germany let’s go back. Of course when we returned we discovered we only liked Germany, we loved Bavaria. So we had to return to Bayern. There is a difference. Americans, to some degree, know three German things: Berlin is the capital where the wall was; Hessians fought (on both sides) in the American Revolution; Little Red Riding Hood and the Brothers Grimm traveled the Black Forest. Everything else Americans know about Germany is Bavaria. Lederhosen, Oktoberfest, Neuschwanstein Castle, the list is extensive but it is all Bayrische.
So we are living Life Back Outside the Comfort Zone. Where everything is metric and takes three hours more than it should. We eat a lot of schnitzel and drink a lot of beer, we massacre the language but the locals nod and help us out, and we see and experience things we never imagined we would. And sometimes I write about them.
This was the second blog, and was when I went to Afghanistan. An Islamic Republic is nowhere near the Bible Belt, so clearly I needed to rename my blog. For someone who loves wearing suits and ties, A Year Without Wearing a Tie seemed perfect. And in an ironic twist, 13 months in, I put on a tie for a job interview. It wasn’t a video interview, just telephonic, but it didn’t feel right to not dress up for an interview. I got over that later and have since conducted interviews in my pajama pants.
By the time I got back home, there were over 2000 subscribers and it became so consumed with bugs, malicious content, and problems that I couldn’t even access it without a massive amount of cleanup. Oddly (?) enough, all I had to do was to pay a cleanup fee to the company I was paying to protect my site and suddenly all was well in the world. Needless to say, I immediately downloaded and transferred everything to a different format. I also screened the spam email addresses out of my list. Let’s just say it shrunk dramatically.
This was the first blog I created. It began life as a Wordpress blog (and is technically still out there in that form) but I transitioned it to a self-hosted Wordpress site.
At the start it was just an attempt to see what might happen. In my first post I explained it as “here I am yelling into the world wide web look at me, read me, I have important news that no one else will dare point out.”
And the name of the blog? Well, a lot of people claim to be from the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” That strange location in the part of the US where God, BBQ, and SEC football are the three most important things in the world—but not necessarily in that order. My observation was that so many people claimed to be from the buckle, that there was no way for the pants to stay up. There is, however, always one last hole in the belt. Maybe it came with the belt, maybe it’s on the small side, maybe on the large side, or as I imagine, it is most likely an extra hole someone made to keep using the belt long past the time to replace it. And THAT, is what my blog was.