February 20, 2025

Thursday

On Monday, President’s Day, C and I decided to check out various beaches on Naval Base Guam. We stopped at one and found it crawling with ants and very little shade. As it was early afternoon, this wasn’t great, but it did look like a nice place to try out snorkeling if we can get there earlier and claim a spot under the trees.

We continued on to the bigger Gab Gab Beach. This recreation area has BBQ pits, large and sturdy blue umbrellas, many shady coconut trees, looked like good snorkeling, a large reef far out, and–best of all for us poor folk who haven’t gotten their household goods, including beach chairs–Adirondack-style chairs on the sand under the shady palms. Bliss!

This part of the beach was the opposite of crowded. Just a few people down the way a bit. While sitting and enjoying the sound of the gentle waves rolling onto the sand, we saw a manta ray–just a round dark flat shadow–swimming up the beach and then back again awhile later.

Then I spotted something bright blue washing around in the surf. On inspection, it turned out to be a blue starfish…unfortunately dead. One little arm curled up. Turns out these are quite common here. I’m looking forward to learning how to snorkel without having a panic attack about breathing under water.

On our way out from the base, we stopped at the War Dog Memorial. This is a circular resting place for 25 war dogs who helped liberate Guam in WWII. There is a wonderful statue of a doberman “Always Faithful” by sculptress Susan Bihary Wilner, and people leave leis and toys and bones on the statue. The dogs served as “sentries, messengers, scouts. They explored caves, detected mines and booby traps” according to the plaque on the statue.

I didn’t get any writing done Tuesday and Wednesday, but I did start some interval training using YouTube videos. I feel a little guilty always using the free videos. My favorite is The Body Project, so I’m thinking I should get a membership since I do find the products helpful.

Wednesday was also a bad tech day. I received a notification from GoDaddy that WordPress had updated. When I logged onto this site, I got some rather concerning error messages. Three hours on the phone with a help tech (and some even more concerning questions such as “do you have a web developer?” and “did you make any changes to the site recently?”) and the answer seemed to be: “We can’t do anything; we need to refer this to a WordPress special technician. That will cost $50+ dollars for the premium service.”

What followed was a tearful discussion about shutting down the site and starting from scratch. And what about getting refunded for the two months I paid for? I was sent a form to fill out and was told NOT to delete the website until I filled it out. I decided to sleep on it anyway because I’m not sure what to do. I’ve been using this self-hosted WordPress website via GoDaddy for six years. It wasn’t easy to figure out all the technical stuff along the way. I’d look up how to do something and follow directions, and generally things worked.

Until they didn’t.

I never did get a workable signup plugin. One that seemed to work for a couple of months ended up crashing my site. Now I’ve removed the social media plugin and all plug ins except the security one. I’m paying a LOT of money per year for a very, very basic site. I think it’s time to try something new. Again.

So, if anyone is reading this blog, keep in mind that I may be moving to a new website in the near future. You SHOULD be able to find it by clicking on my shelleyburbank.com address as I will be keeping my domain name (ALSO expensive. It’s up to $50+ dollars a year including domain protection.)

My other option is to simply close the site and use Substack. The irony is that I’ve been weaning off of social media and was feeling good about myself for having my own website “platform.”

All this is not conducive to creativity and writing. It’s difficult to justify these kinds of expenses (and time) at my professional level. I’m not Danielle Steel or Tara French! I’m not raking in the big sales. There is a kind of “build it and they will come” mentality in the writing community, and we all hear about those that succeed. There’s not so much out there about those who don’t exactly fail but kind of stumble along, making a go of it, maybe spending more than they make but not by a lot, or maybe making just a bit more than they spend.

If I were to start all over again, I’d jump on Substack immediately and get a mailing list. I’d use a free website or a basic hosted website builder like WordPress.com (which is different from what I have here, self-hosted WordPress which I had to build myself from a template) and point my domain to it.

The problem for me now is that I have a good Google search rank. Google has “crawled” my site and when people search “Shelley Burbank” or “Shelley Burbank Writer” my site is high up on the list. If I change, that might push me down the list quite a ways. Of course, I’ll keep my social media pages “live” and can point from there to the new site. I’m not sure how many people actually “Google” my name anyway. It’s all so . . . ugh!