Last One to the Party

If growing older and becoming more self-aware  taught me anything, it's this: I'm pretty lame.  I'm not an adrenalin junkie.  I'm never the life of any party.  Nobody swoons over my fashion choices. I have to look up slang words and phrases on Urban Dictionary.com to find out what they mean.  I'll never be the neighborhood cool mom.  And that's all fine with me. 

There's one way in which I'm really lame though, and that is in my efforts not to jump onto any bandwagon until said wagon isn't trendy anymore. So a while back when everybody started announcing, "My blog is going private!"  I decided not to go private myself.  I liked that old friends could find us if they so chose.  It was fun to get back in touch with people from my past who happened upon our blog.  And honestly, I just wasn't that worried about it.  I was always careful to be vague about where we lived, even blurring out City League soccer jerseys in every picture.  I was pretty sure that no creepers were going to try and track us down and steal my kids.

But recently a few things have happened that made me change my mind. First, I became more aware of a picture I posted of a burning mountainside.  I realized that one could easily determine from where I took the picture, based on the angle and distance of the mountain and a street sign that I failed to blur.  I also didn't blur any soccer jerseys or hide the fact that the kids had gone to soccer camp at BYU in that same post.  Realizing that I'd become lazy and less aware of what kind of information I'd put out there made me a little nervous.  In addition, I have been getting tons of hits from complete strangers (like, close to a thousand) doing Google searhes for Trash Pack birthday parties.  So after thinking over these factors for a bit, I did a Google search of my own name to see what I would find.  My own picture did not come up on any Image results, but quite a few pictures of my kids did.  And that made me feel a little weird.  I still don't think that anything will happen to them, but I don't know how excited I am about pictures of my kids showing up in Google searches.  It feels wrong somehow.

So all of this is a really drawn-out announcement of: we're going private.  If you would like to continue having access to this blog, just let me know.  Message your email address to me here or at katiekonold(at)gmail(dot)com.  Much love.

(See that?  Tom Cruise reference.  Told you I was lame.)