ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Last week I decided I wanted to make a new website completely separate from the site I have already.

There’s a billboard near our house with a picture of a girl leaping for joy. The printing along the top says something like “Get the best out of your life!” and for months I drove by it and thought the site address at the bottom was pork.edu. I thought the whole thing was about the stupidest damn advertisement for pig products, ever. I even went to the website and found that it didn’t exist, and spent days being indignant as I drove by a stupid billboard for a stupid website that didn’t even exist. Then one day I drove on the side closest to the sign, and saw that the stupid thing was actually an ad for nearby Park University.

So after I made an appointment for an eye exam, naturally my first idea for a domain to register was Pork.edu. It was perfect, I thought! I would confuse everyone by creating a site that had nothing to do with either pork or education! Then I discovered, with great dismay, that only accredited educational institutions can register edu domains. Getting fake accreditation seemed like far too much trouble for something that I was basically planning to use as a blog site, so instead I thought hard all weekend for the name of my new site.

I started out considering alternative Pork domains, but it soon became clear that the only way I could get pork anything would be if I registered a domain with a national extension, of which most of the first world nations were taken, and only countries like Belize were still left, no offense, Belize. So I started thinking of my other options, which began as an attempt at rational list making and devolved into a free associative exercise in which I looked around my room and let my mind wander as I thought of syllables I thought sounded good together. This got me some ideas like Owlattack.com and the close second Snailcrusade.com, but I didn’t especially like either of these. Incidentally, Porkattack.com was available, but didn’t appeal to me that much in the end. Plus it sounds like it could be a porno site.

So I thinking I might do something with toads involved. I thought about making up a story about how I thought of a weirdo site involving toads, but there isn’t any good reason. I just made a short list of words I like, and combined them until I found something that I thought sounded good. It’s not that toads have no significance to me, though. Last year we had a tiny toad living in our driveway, and I always liked that incorrigible Mr. Toad and his little motorcar from the Wind in the Willows, and all my life I’ve been rather fond of toads in general. When I was little I used to catch toads out in the yard, generally after a strong rain, since after the frightened creature urinated all over my hands I always needed the biggest puddle available to rinse them in.

I also wanted to say that the picture I made for this site is the single best drawing I’ve ever done of a toad or a frog. I’ve already decided that the bottom toad is named Sara, and the boy toad is named Justin. The important thing is that they’re smiling, which means that they are toads in love.