And a blog ends.

Hello everyone out there in cyberspace who might be reading this,

I thought I would give everyone a quick explanation and also a little bit of an advance warning as to why I am ending this blog on Vox.

This page will stay up for a little while as I gather up those past blog posts I wish to keep as a part of my own personal journal, but soon I will be taking it all down and will cease all blogging here on Vox.

My reasons for ending the blog are multiple:

1. I started my own business recently, and it has started to consume my entire life. People tell me this is normal for the life of a business owner. I am OK with it for the most part, as I enjoy my work. The problem is at night I feel so tired that I just want to veg out and relax with a hot bath and a book. The business is going very well; that is not the problem. The problem is I sit at the PC all day working, so when the evening arrives I find myself more interested in reading or taking walks or doing other things aside from sitting on the computer some more.

2. While this blogging platform seemed very exciting to me at first, I have to be honest: some of the mechanics of the Vox interface drive me bats to the point I avoid using it because it feels like such a pain in the ass as compared to other blogging platforms available. Even if the other platforms don't have cool free layouts like Vox does, they at least seem faster and more intuitive to me, and I'd rather have an ugly blog no one reads that is easy for me to use as my personal journal than a pretty blog that gets read but has features and controls so annoying I don't want to write anything. I'm sorry to say this stuff, as I think there are many nice things about Vox, and I have encountered such nice people here, but I just can't stand some of the mechanics.

3. Our computer at home has security on it--in fact, multiple layers of it. But we were recently infiltrated with some kind of virus that traced back to Vox. This is probably random-- I am not accusing the software or the users here of doing bad things. All I know is: the big bad virus looks like it came from something over here--perhaps a third party add-on or something. But all I know is, I need to be cautious. (By the way, another different virus seemed to come from Facebook-land, so I am not going over there very much any more, either.)

So...I suspect this is my last post here on Vox. If anyone would like to reach me, you can send an email to my Gmail which is annamatt. (I purposefully just phrased that sentence awkwardly to try to avoid Internet bots from grabbing my email address and spamming me, so I hope the phrasing was intuitive enough that anyone who wants to reach me can in fact do so.) I do not open my Gmail as often as my other email accounts, so please be patient with me, knowing the response will take me awhile.

I want to say a quick thank you to all the nice people I have met through Vox the past 2 years. I have really been touched by some of my interactions with random strangers on here and I appreciate everything you have all done for me. I am sorry to be leaving this community but I hope you will understand my situation.

Will I ever blog again? Most likely. I have blog post ideas in my head all the time; I am always seeing fun restaurants, shops, and places to blog about, and I am still a snack addict and a bath and body product addict who wants to share her fun finds with others. I think I just need a little time to mature my business and restore my schedule to an even keel. 

Now, it's time to go run one of those hot baths... My back hurts from sitting at this computer so much.