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.
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