About three months ago, a friend approached me. Seems she had a trip planned to El Sal­vador and had a falling out with her trav­el com­pan­ion. Would I be inter­est­ed?

Now, dear read­er… I pass the hat for my Patre­on when it comes to rent and gro­ceries. I’m mak­ing ends meet, but not by that much. And only THAT because I have a room­mate, keep my costs low, and work odd jobs when they come my way. Though the idea of inter­na­tion­al trav­el is intoxicating—especially now that I’m not liv­ing with a partner—I had to tell her no. I sim­ply couldn’t afford it. It might be in the bud­get in a year or so, but I’d also like to move to San­ta Cruz or the area, and that is going to be a sharp uptick in month­ly costs from East Bay.

“Oh no,” she said. “I’d be pay­ing for your flight and lodg­ings. Some food too. You’d just have to cov­er a lit­tle extra and maybe toss in what you could when you could.”

So of COURSE I said yes.

Of COURSE I did.

That is the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a life­time: inter­na­tion­al trav­el, basi­cal­ly for free. Short of my writ­ing fame VASTLY out­strip­ping my income, I don’t think that’ll ever be some­thing that hap­pens again.

That trip begins July 1st. I’ll be gone through the 9th.

How­ev­er, this blog won’t sim­ply go qui­et, but I am going to use the oppor­tu­ni­ty to move some posts over from our old Blog­ger loca­tion. I’ve been notic­ing, as I blog about writ­ing, that there are old posts I want to ref­er­ence and sort of foun­da­tion­al arti­cles that real­ly need to be here. (Not JUST so I don’t have to link out to the old blog, but yes, also that.) And it’s much eas­i­er to have the post handy to link to than to try to remem­ber that you need to go back and add such-and-such a link to a post “one of these days.”

But this won’t just be copy/pasta, my friends. These posts will be refur­bished. A revi­sion. Some new con­tent. Sev­er­al new jokes. I won’t take out the twen­ty-year-old pop cul­ture ref­er­ences (which might, by now, be THIR­TY-year-old pop cul­ture ref­er­ences), but I absolute­ly will be adding more! I can’t promise that these will be as com­plete­ly redone as Star Tours in 2011, but they won’t be the same old arti­cles either.

A week won’t be enough time to get EVERYTHING here that I’ve been want­i­ng to move over, but I can take a good chunk out of the most urgent­ly need­ed link­able con­tent.

So take care while I’m gone. Check out the new and improved… uh… old con­tent. And don’t for­get that… You Should Be Writ­ing.