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Replanting

| Madame Ximon

At the beginning of 2017 I was posting daily on the Icon Alchemy website, creating digital art to accompany my musings on astrology, and gearing up for a new event season after moving across continent, coming back home to the Pacific Northwest after nearly three decades of performing, art making, and event organizing & promoting on the East Coast.

Then came my cancer diagnosis.

Everything ground to a halt.

I successfully battled cancer for the remainder of 2017, and slowly began to recover in 2018. But before I got my health back in good enough shape to return to regular posting on my website, something went horribly wrong with my site’s database. Something that left my tech advisors scratching their heads, and my website unusable.

Meanwhile, life in the analog world got crazier, with multiple deaths in the family and the subsequent loss of the family home and most of my possessions piled into storage for over a year. My website languished in a mess of broken code.

2020 didn’t help matters, but with the cancellation of the live shows that had been my bread and butter it did give me the time and impetus to finally try to figure out what had really gone wrong with my website.

It turns out that it wasn’t a hack (what we’d initially thought it was). Instead, the months that my website had gone un-updated due to chemo-brain and sleeping off the exhaustion of radiation treatments were really bad for my poor website. Bad enough to make the database unrecognizable as a database.

After months of valiant effort at recovery by a tech friend, we finally decided to nuke it from orbit and start again.

And now here I am. Glad to have a working website again, at long last! Yes, there are still bits that are wonky, since I haven’t yet found all of the stuff in the theme that isn’t really compatible with my audience and my design sensibilities, and there is still so much to add to make this place truly my own. But that is part of the Icon Alchemy process, crafting the visual environment that reflects my truth, and welcomes my tribe, and gives you all the tools to make the best use of what I have to offer you.

So welcome back, and feel free to look around, but please pardon the rough edges as I continue to replant my virtual garden here. I’ve got so many exciting things to show you in the days ahead!