Killerwebs is a name that my brother thought up for me back in 1995 when I was first getting into website design. I didn’t even know what a website was. The internet was still something foreign to most households and as I was starting my senior year in college, I was asked to be the content creator for a country music interest group for the Prodigy Online Service (that is how we got online back in those days – dialing into a service like America Online, Prodigy & CompuServe which were the big three services most chose from). I was drawing a blank…had no idea what to call my “little business” and it just fell out of his mouth.
With a shrug, I agreed to the name and Killerwebs was born. It’s a domain name I have owned ever since. The website has gone through many iterations over the past 25+ years but my heart was never really into promoting myself which is what business websites are supposed to do. After working for other people and on their projects, honestly the last thing I wanted to do was MORE website design for me. So the site would come and go and come back again. I eventually got rid of all together several years ago, keeping the domain because (1) it’s a GOOD name, (2) I have had email addresses using it for decades and (3) you just never know….
When the pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, like most people I had a little bit of worry about my job. I had been working for the past 5 years a marketing/art director for a local company and I wasn’t sure if it was something that would survive the shut downs and subsequent economic consequences many businesses ended up having to endure. But it not only survived, it THRIVED as our company was deemed an essential business – as we manufacture sanitation equipment – and people who were losing their jobs were investing in themselves in a big way and starting their own sanitation companies. So while my job was secure for the moment, the reality of changing administrations that aren’t very economy friendly and a boss who loves to express his pessimism about where the economy is going, has led me to ponder — A LOT.
When you’re alone during a pandemic, thinking is something that one can do quite a bit of. And I had made it a personal goal during this time to look a little more inward. Part of that was to get better at saying daily prayer. So one day I asked, “So, what should I do? I’m listening.”
A little background… 13 years ago, when my daughter was 5 years old, we had come home from a day of work (for me) and a day at Nana’s (her) and walked into our home to find my husband of 10 years laying lifeless on our living room couch. Without getting into too much detail in THIS particular post (maybe later, I dunno), he had succumbed to an addiction. And while his death was accidental, it started an avalanche of self-doubt (I felt betrayed & abandoned), fear (our future plans were now non-existent & I was now a single mom to the most perfect human being I had ever met) and enormous amounts of grief (self-explanatory. Being a widow SUCKS!) So my faith was shook. I have been clinging to this unfinished business with my husband thing for the past decade + and it’s been pretty much survival mode ever since.
Fast forward to NOW. My daughter is in college. She has decided that a path headed towards a career in medicine is for her (and she’s serious about it), she’s met a boy (and she’s serious about him) and all of a sudden, I don’t see much of a path in front of me any more. I could always count on putting all my energy in HER life but now I realized that maybe I should start thinking about mine. So one morning, I asked, “What’s next?”
It was a very noisy ride to work that morning. I conducted a business meeting with myself entirely in my head and the answer came plain as day, “BRING BACK KILLERWEBS!” It seemed like such an awesome idea, that I had already decided by the time I reached the office, that I was going to purchase website hosting and I was going to do it right this time. I reached the office at 6:15 and by 6:30 I had paid for three years of hosting and I was sitting at my screen – a blank slate, ready for me to make some magic.
I nodded and patted myself on the leg and said outloud, “good start, Kris. We’ll revisit the site tomorrow.”
Good plan.