It has been a year-and-a-half since we put out the final issue of Critter Chatter in the paper edition, and a lot has happened in that time. It caught us by surprise how quickly Critter Chatter went from being a profitable and growing publication to being a barely profitable and shrinking one, although looking back I can see that the signs were there....

While a labor of love, Critter Chatter was also providing a growing portion of my income, and I had neglected my other business while focusing my attention on the magazine. Now I needed to devote my time to re-energizing that business. At the time I thought it would take six months to get things back on track so that I could get back to working on the Critter Chatter online magazine, but real life kept getting in the way of my plans.

We are going to make some changes in the website, including moving it to a new host server, and will be working on it off-line. This site will be here but will not be active. When the new look is ready it will replace this one. We will be adding a number of new features. Critter Chatter will continue to have information specific to the metro Atlanta and north Georgia areas, and will also include information of interest to people in other parts of the country.

A lot has happened during the time we were down, and we weren’t able to comment on it. We’ll have a few thoughts on many of these topics when we come back.

Among the events we missed were these:

Last winter, while hiking with her dog Ella on a trail in the north Georgia mountains, Meredith Emerson, was kidnapped and murdered. Emerson, 24 and a recent UGA graduate, loved the outdoors and getting away with Ella to enjoy the peace, quiet and solitude that the forest provided. That evil found her in the place she went to get away from the things we see on the evening news made the crime seem even worse.