Travelogue?

At it's heart, this blog, which replaces grolsons.com ( see the previous post), is a travelogue. I have been remiss, and have not recorded anything of note, nor noted anything of record, from several trips. Mostly, I guess that has been because said trips have been rushed, and, while somewhat enjoyable, sandwiched between piles of "keeping up" with work.

While my wife can tell me what I have done, and where I have been, and how I have enjoyed it, it seems that in my own mind the trips blur together in my mind, in much the same way that my tertiary languages, Spanish and French, seem to. (if I envision my memory as a series of drawers, "trips" are in one drawer, and "words that are neither English or German" are in another.)

If I keep a journal, I can look back on what I have done, and remember. Sometimes I enjoy taking the time to do that, and other times I can't be bothered.

This itinerary is so low key, I will take time to record my thoughts, whether or not related to actual events of this trip. Events that I plan will include large swaths of time sitting poolside, sipping a beverage.

You know, maybe this is not a travelogue after all.

The death of grolsons.com

As an overseas teacher in the mid 90's, full of pride in my moderate HTML coding skills, I created a website to use as a teaching tool with my students (international school hard-copy resources being slow and hard to come by at best and unavailable at worst), as a hobby, as a professional recruiting tool (resume, references, and philosophy posted for potential employers' access), and most of all as a communication (family pictures and narratives of our adventures) tool to reach our families back home.

 It worked great on all fronts, and was a positive asset at a job interview or two. However, Web 2.0 caught up with it: Facebook, Blogger, and Google tools have effectively usurped, replaced, and made obsolete all of the functions of that website. My HTML skills, failing to grow, had also become obsolete.

While having a domain, and our own email through it was kind of nice, we decided about five years ago to let the domain expire, and acknowledge that the grolsons website had served its purpose and by now just seemed pretentious. Auto billing and sloth (well, that's harsh--how about "inattention")kept it alive.

Until last week. You can now search "www.grolsons.com" and instead of finding pictures of my kids when they were much younger, will find a domain expired notice and ads for cheap mortgages. Also, if you email any of us at an address ending in @grolsons.com, you can rest assured that we will never see it.

Though we made this decision years ago, my wife's initial reaction ("hey, my grolsons email does not seem to be working..."), even though she uses her yahoo account almost exclusively, was one of shock and dismay. The same as the reaction from my older son, who has long eschewed his grolsons email account, and who has been quietly slightly embarrassed by the website. Arlee put it this way: it's like a friend or relative was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given a few weeks to live, then, they fight it and live well for years. You are unprepared, shocked, and saddened, when the day finally arrives.

"Well, you've known it was coming," is no solace at all. So let's have a moment of silence for grolsons.com. If you want to email me, use my gmail account. And if you want to see family pictures, friend me on Facebook. If you want to hire me: I'm not looking for a job right now; I have a great one.

And let's remember together that everything and everyone is indeed temporary--and make the most of it.