This Monday I found out that, while I was out in Surrey at the Conference, I had been used as a guinea pig in a bold and transformative experiment…

without my permission.

You can imagine how I feel about that.

You’d be wrong.

I can’t say I felt quite normal all weekend: for one thing, I was awake at seven-thirty or eight each morning. Or, okay, eight-twenty the day I accidentally switched my alarm ringer to “silent” (what the hell kinda option is that for an alarm, I ask you???). Still, there was coffee there and I managed to feed myself through a combination of cold, hard cash and making myself useful to the Board members, who plied me with oat cakes, fruit roll-ups, and a whopping big plate of mediocre buffet food on one glorious occasion.

Hey, at least the pasta salad is always a safe choice.

For another, I came down with the cold/flu bug that’s going around. So I was not quite feeling myself; still, it’s traditional that when the rains come so do the germs. I’ll get a hot water bottle and some advil and I’ll live.

I managed to struggle home and blog on Monday, whereupon I checked stats (I know: how unthinkable is that, eh? Me checking stats) and I found a whole raging snotload of hits from some WordPress official page called Trick or Treat.

I could not recall having posted to such a page, so I had no idea why 90-some-odd people were coming to my blog through a link there, so of course I figured I’d go and check it out.

I also noticed a simple comment: HA! from some guy named Andy. Turns out Andy is … hmmmm, if not exactly Mr. WordPress the way the dad was Mr. Brady, he’s one of the handful of wee Wordpressers; in other words, he’s living in the big house and closer to Mr. WordPress than Cousin Oliver: perhaps think of him as Greg. What weirds me out, though, is that he’s just left another comment: what has he done THIS TIME???

FYI: I’d like a small island in the South Pacific…

So here I am adding to my scrapbook collection of Inet superstars: Xeni down, Andy down, Scoble, you’re next!

But what does this mean? you’re probably asking, and not for the first or last time on this blog, let me tell you.

WordPress gave me a pressie: in fact, they gave me a promotion. I am now the proud owner of www.raincoaster.com, and this is it.

Yep, WordPress just up and gave me my own domain, which is more than years of Machiavellian efforts on my own behalf have been able to do, let me tell you.

The view is more beautiful now that it is mine.