The Official Website of Author Tarah L. Wolff Just another WordPress site

I started something new for myself the other day. I’ve been working on the idea of putting together a recipes website for a very long time. The hardest client for any web designer is themselves. I got this site done and was/am happy with it, though it isn’t anywhere near as commercial as I think I would like it to be now. Anyway, I based my new recipes website off of this design. I thought it made sense because I wouldn’t be buying yet another domain (ask any web designer we have domains coming out of our ears) but instead it would be a subdomain of tarahlynn.com.

Recipes.Tarahlynn.com

Once I was able to settle in on this particular unique format (spiral notebook on the right etc.) the design came very easily. The only real struggle I ran into with the new recipes site that with the switch now to WordPress 3.0 a lot of my code that I was using to start my WordPress designs with (namely the comments code) stopped working correctly. Royal pain in the ass. I had to go back to hard code and start entirely from scratch with my WordPress design. I don’t know if other designers do this but I have a base code I always start to avoid constantly typing the same code over and over again. It takes time to develop this base code though, especially for something as complicated as WordPress. So, to the say the least, having to start from scratch was both disheartening and maddening.

I finally got my prints up in the Blank Canvas Gallery. Thank God. Prints are done, prints are hung and they look spectacular and they are beautiful. When I went to the gallery the day before I left, literally the day after I got them hung up, every person who walked in made an almost bee-line to look at those photos. It was incredible. It made me feel so good. But that doesn’t translate into income and as soon as the golf course closes this fall, and we still haven’t sold this house in Oklahoma, I have no idea how I am going to pay my bills. My car payment and now the payment on the loan for these prints. I’m afraid I took a step for my future and it may have been a nail in the coffin of my future.

Sharon has my book, she just finished reading Part One and I’m going to be sending her Part Two. But, like everything else that I do, besides the praise and the wonderful support I get from everyone. I’m not making a penny.

I’m trying to avoid talking about my personal life right now. I’m trying to think of somehow coming up with another 600 words in this post to completely side step around telling you that I’m in Oklahoma right now and it is the hardest, worst time of my life. He left me when I was gone, something much easier to do than if I were here. Something we swore to each other that we would never do. It feels like I came back to someone who has already gotten over me, someone whose standing there going, “It’s been four months, what do you expect?” That’s not how it is, but it is how it feels.

Moving On

We’re going to lose everything this year, have I told you that? Last night my mom told me over the phone that she was looking at the auction flier for the golf course. It’ll be gone by October 8th, if it doesn’t sell before the auction. We sold the blueberries and a very large piece of property that was on the golf course. It’s all going to debt. If my mother can’t yet be described as drowning than I don’t know what drowning looks like. In the meantime the endlessly disgusting process of her trying to divorce my father has turned him so petty that it is pitiful. The circus plays on and it all just kind of makes me want to abandon the male race.

Slander

I have become acquainted with this word too many times in my life. My entire childhood was an endless spew of never ending slander out of my father’s mouth and my just trying to be good that it never be about me. But of course it was, just never to my face, like it was about everyone.

My father (of course, this won’t surprise you) has managed to find himself a female bitch lawyer that professional slander seems to be what she majored in. It only took him three other lawyers over the past year and a half to finally find one that would agree with him that my mother should have to pay for him to simply live out the rest of his days without working. The only thing we have to hold on to is that we know he’s being charged astronomically for her services. As if any of this is going to matter in it end anyway. And that is what is so infuriating. It’s just more delay before my mother (and consequently me) can move on with her life.

It’s all so fucking sad.

The etching away at our lives has begun in earnest. I just wish that etching was the right word, God working away everything we’ve ever loved with a little baby rock hammer. But that’s not how it is. He’s using a sledge hammer. Within another three months everything besides my mom and the house I grew up in, will be gone. Sold, lost or leaving me behind.

I don’t know if I will ever know grief as deep as this, coming at me from so many different sides. I pray I never experience anything so completely all consuming again, and I stopped praying a long time ago.

Last night I held Joseph’s face again my breasts, wrapped my legs and my arms all around him and he held me. I told him, “this is where I am always going to keep you.” He laughed because he thought I was joking, and meaning it literally. But that is where I will always keep him, against my heart, holding on as tight as I can to what I can remember of the good times before it was all gone.