I Lost My Website

I lost my website! I looked under the beds, in the closets, in the back yard (in case my dog dragged it outside), behind the refrigerator, in the attic, behind my son’s ears, under both sofas, under all the sofa cushions (which was a lucrative place to look), in my car, in my daughter’s lair (generally a no-man’s land), and everywhere else but I couldn’t find it.
Then I realized that a company whose name could be pronounced Yey-Who (which is defined as a country bumpkin – and by sheer coincidence is the only word I can think of right now that rhymes with pumpkin), this company had allowed my domain name to expire. If you don’t know what a domain name is, consider yourself lucky. You are oblivious to websites and the internet. Why is this good? I don’t know, I’m blathering.
Alright, alright I’ll tell you what a domain name is. It’s the name where you reach a website or blog, such as kissmyfoot.com. The www part in front of that stands for World Wide Web – not to be confused with SLW, Simply Local Web. This web actually doesn’t really exist. I just made it up. As a matter of fact, there isn’t any other Web – world wide or otherwise – so you can get away with simply typing kissmypatootie.com without the www. You sure as heck don’t need the extra http colon forward-slash forward-slash in front of the web address, as in this example: http://www.pullmyfinger.com. Typing that to get to a website just shows that you are a rube amateur when it comes to the internet.
EXCEPT when you’re going to an FTP site. This stands for Foot Toe Pie. Ha Ha. It really stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is a fancy phrase website designers use to describe how they get stuff off their home computer (like sticky buggers) onto the World Wide Web for everyone else to partake of. But you don’t need to know anything about that because you are not a website designer.
Which leads me to why I lost my website. This certain web company I mentioned earlier whose name rhymes with BaBoo had my domain name, but they kept raising the price every year. Well, I raised a stink, so to speak, when they automatically renewed my domain name at an even higher price. I could have sworn I’d cancelled my service with them, but there was no documentation etc. etc. so I paid - but swore it would be the last time. I cancelled reordering my domain name from them, but it was about 11 months ago, and a person like me can forget a lot of stuff in 11 months, believe you me.
Since I had cancelled, when the year was up, this company didn’t warn me my domain name was going to be cancelled, and somehow I neglected to put a tickler on my calendar to remind myself. A tickler, if you don’t know, is a feather device that tickles you silly when something is coming up. It especially loves the armpits and behind the knees – it would get the bottoms of your feet if it could reach. You’ll do anything to make it stop because you’re just about to wet your pants.
So my domain name expired, unbeknownst to me, and since I’ve been working so many hours and haven’t blogged in a coon’s age and then some, I didn’t notice until one of my loving fans (and neighbor) expressed his extreme disappointment that I haven’t been filling pages of nonsense and that my website now was an advertisement from the Web company to buy frivolous stuff of no use to anyone on this, or any other, planet.
So I’m happy to say that I got my domain name – gentlehumor.com – and my website back. And the web company was nice about it all – very helpful. I hold no grudge against them except for the skyrocketing raise in prices of previous years but, hey, they’re trying to make a living too, just like the rest of us. They just believe it should be a very GOOD living.
So you, oh loyal and faithful readers, can expect many more words out of me. I can’t claim they’ll be sensible, honest, or even amusing, but, just like beans around the campfire during a cattle drive, there’ll be plenty of ‘em.