I lost my site for quite a few months, due mostly to my own laziness and negligence. I let my paid plan, which gave me my domain, caseyangelova.com, expire, along with my custom email address, me@caseyangelova.com, which was used to manage my login.

I kept getting emails in March and April notifying me to renew my payment, but I brushed it off for another day… and another… and then I got my final notice that it was going to be cancelled. I again just put it off, as if they were not serious. WordPress was giving me a final warning… I somehow was just tempting fate…

Do I even care if I lose my site? It is not like I am actively writing… I mean, I have aspirations to write, but what is the point in the age of social media.

Then I got the notice that it was cancelled. My time had run out… and it was at that moment that it hit me: all those many years of writing about my life, Eating, Gardening and Living in Bulgaria… since 2008, almost 20 years, gone.

I frantically sought to undo what I had done and feverishly looked into recovering my site, but due to my own foolishness, I had never set up a recovery email or attached my phone number to my account. I spent a good many hours in April 2026 trying to revive the written history of my time in Bulgaria.

The catch-22 was that my account was registered to an email that I didn’t have access to. I am not a tech person, but I have some limited skills for my advanced age. I wrote a slew of emails to no avail. They couldn’t give me access to the old account without proper documentation, such as a paid receipt for my annual service. The receipts that I did have were so old that they were not sufficient.

I didn’t have any financial documentation either. My US bank account, which I had since 2000, was closed due to lack of activity, since I don’t live in the US. Fuck you Chase! I had no way to access my old bank statements.

At the beginning of May, I did manage to reclaim my domain and email address, although they were now registered to another WordPress account that contained none of my 18 years of content. I tried to use my reclaimed email address to reset my password, but my efforts were fruitless.

I could not figure out the settings and, by this point, I was just mentally exhausted, so I put it on the back burner… until the dog days of summer got me thinking about using AI to help guide me through the process of reclaiming my site.

Which it did, obviously, since this post is published on my custom domain.

It turns out that I was registered to some Titan email, and it took an hour or so of reconfiguring the settings to receive emails, eventually reset the password, and gain access to Eating, Gardening & Living in Bulgaria. The content was there, but the domain was in my new account.

After a few more queries, I managed to combine the two accounts and delete the spare…

While waiting for the internet mumbo jumbo to reset and the site to become live, I decided to share my journey.

I don’t know why I want to write, or to whom this post is directed, but I have grown a bit tired of just sharing on social media, which I also do rather haphazardly.

I am not an influencer. I don’t want to be. But I want to enjoy sharing what is spinning around in my head when I am making soap, working in the garden, making ferments, or whatever direction the wind is blowing me.

I would like to say I will be writing more often, or actually being consistent, but for the time being, I am happy that I got this far.