My site has gone a little wonky in the last few days with really sloooooooooooooowwwwww loading time and it was almost impossible to do anything on my site. Just logging in took more than 5 minutes, and it was a matter of time before I gave up trying and I contacted my site host.

1 email and barely 2 minutes later, Vodien confirmed that there has been an on-going loading issue that has yet to be resolved on their end, and offered to migrate my site to a different server. They started the migration quite quickly upon my confirmation and within 12 hours, my site is up and running again. I have, so far, been really impressed with their support services – always swift, responsive and really genuine in offering their support. Thank you, Vodien!

The server issue resulted in me having a little blogging withdrawal, and, as annoying as it was not being able to do anything about it, having no productive access to my blog in the last 48 hours did me some good. It gave me some downtime from focusing on my own site and turned me into a Guest Blogger!

In that span of time, I managed to write 2 posts for 2 other bloggers; something that I have really been wanting to get down to but somehow could not get my act together. Server downtime? Not a bad deal at all! At least I got some of my shit together.

I had a pleasant surprise this morning when I found out that Yuliya from Tiny Expats has kindly posted up my writing on her blog – it had seemed only hours since I sent her my word document, and truly wasn’t expecting it to be published at all, at least not so soon.

So here’s a big, fat THANK YOU to Yuliya for posting up my thoughts on raising kids in a foreign land – a topic close to her (and my) heart. Do check out her blog for more eye-opening expat stories.

Meantime, below is an excerpt of the article I wrote on my attempt at Guest Blogging:

Both my kids were born in Bangkok. Apart from the occasional visits back to The Netherlands or Singapore, they know not of any other places that is home. To them, Bangkok is home and the rented apartment we live in is home-home to them; the only one they know.

Technically speaking, despite being born here, Bangkok is not actually their native home. Their parents came from not only different countries, but are indeed culturally different and have, for almost a decade been living in a totally different country that has a completely different culture altogether.

Talk about being culturally confused!

Wherein other expats would be worried about their kids’ assimilation to a new country when they move from their native home-base, I worry about them assimilating to the countries where their original homes should be if we ever settle in our own homeland in either The Netherlands or Singapore permanently. More so in Singapore, given my culturally complicated background.

That being said, I’m not even sure if I would consider them as 3rd culture kids as we haven’t been moving around too much.

You can read more on my Lament of Raising Kids in a World of People’s Culture on Tiny Expats’ site. 

My site is currently under-going some re-construction on the back-end, and if you have keen eyes, you would have noticed that the Blogroll list on my sidebar is looking funky for sometime now (who does blogroll for Google & Yahoo!), my Background page is still empty, the images on my stand-alone Blogroll page do not match the Bloggers’ link I have on there and the Twitter button is still not linking up yet.

Please pardon my tardiness.

That’s really because it’s still on a testing and work-in-progress mode as we go about tweaking the look of it. At present, I still need to figure that out and I haven’t got around to linking them up properly.  So, my sincere apologies if you feel that I have been errant, and to bloggers on my Blogroll page, please do not get offended.

With the wrapping up of  #Blogging 101 and 201,  I hope I’m able to spend some time to fix it and give my blog the tweaks it requires. My site runs on wordpress.org platform (not wordpress.com) and thus, some of the features available on the latter is not an .org feature – this applies to “follow me” button, as well as the automated blogroll links to name a few.  Bummer.

Being on .org would also explain as to why you would have to key in your email address to subscribe to my blog and not just click on the follow button. There is no “follow me” button on .org. I know it is a pain for some and probably the reason why most would not bother to, and for those who have, I thank you for taking the little trouble to key in by your email address. You have NOOOOO idea how much I appreciate that.

There’s also one other thing which I have been meaning to do since the #Blogging 101 Adding a Page Assignment – that is to fix all my back links from my older site to Grubbs ‘n Critters.

Being the geek that my husband is, he figured out how to update the back-links with some nifty tricks by writing a query. With his help, he has managed to automatically update over 3000 (!) back links from my old site to Grubbs ‘n Critter within a few hours. I still have a little less than 200 links to update manually and I’ll have to do it in due time – but that is better than having to do more than 4000 back-links MANUALLY!

My geeky husband even thought that whole exercise was fun and has enthusiastically written a post on it at my suggestion. I guess he’ll be my first guest blogger and I’ll be putting up his post soon. Let me warn you it’s all technical, geek-speak. I’m just not too bright for all of that!

Meantime, it’s business as usual.  I’ll continue to blog as often as I can and I hope that you’ll continue to leave comments every now and then. I’m still contemplating on the last assignment of polling, and I figured with .org, I might need to do a little research on how that can be done on my site first.

Till then. Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.