I have always loved poetry. Specifically, I have always loved romantic poetry. I was alone and bored in the Fall of 1997, and looking to pass the time, I started Live the Dream over one of the other large free web hosts on November 29, 1997. I updated and maintained the site through the Summer of 1998, when several things happened.

First, I was in the middle of transcribing the entire works of John Donne and selected works from Ezra Pound when I suffered a major hard drive crash. How major? I lost over 200 John Donne poems and aver 150 Ezra Pound poems. I was bummed. I was mad. I was... well, I am sure you can image.

Before I could start transcribing them again, a wonderful woman entered my life (well, entered is probably not the right word, we had known each other before I started Live the Dream). She and I moved in together, and all my time was consumed with her.

After the "newness" wore off between us, and we were no longer spending every waking moment clinging to each other, I decided to take a look at all the stuff I had kinda abandoned since we got together. Well, to my suprise, at some point between the Summer of 98 and the Summer of 99 (yes, it took a year for the "newness" to wear off!), my old host had merged with a bigger fish in the cyber-sea, and I could no longer update my original site.

About this time, I got the job I always wanted, being a web designer / web master. The company I was working for finally put me in charge of the web site. I say web site, see, I work for a group of radio stations, and we actually have four web sites. Power 103, a top 40 station, The All New 99.7 KBCY, a country music station, 102 the BEAR, a classic rock station, and AbileneJobs.com, a local job seach service. I redesigned these sites from the ground up, giving them a new look (some more than one new look!). During the year I have been running these sites, our traffic has went from maybe (and that's a BIG maybe) 5,000 hits a month to over 100,000 hits a month. Expect The All New 99.7 KBCY to have a new look before the end of the month!

Well, the other night, my life-mate asked me about "that poetry site you used to do." So, I tried to get the big conglomerate to help me reaccess it, but they basically ignored me. I built my first web site here at Fortune City, just to see if I could do it, and what I could do (you can see it here, if you like). So I thought that since the other place couldn't help me, I would come back home and Live the Dream here.