What’s In A Name?

The original format of my blog several years back was a place for me to post pictures from University of Texas football games. I was a season ticket holder for almost twenty years, and I enjoyed shooting photos of the game and crowds. My site was called Scenes From The Fourth Row because…my seats were on the fourth row. The title was literal.

That was fun for a while, but it got a little redundant to edit pictures of the same stuff all the time, and once football season was over, I didn’t really have anything to post the rest of the year. There was a lot of downtime on the blog.

Sometime around 2015, I decided to start an actual written blog. I already owned the domain for Scenes From The Fourth Row, so I kept the name from my old website. I considered it a metaphor for my own life. I don’t really want to be in the front most of the time, but I like to be close enough to see what’s going on. The fourth row is about right. (Cheesy, itsn’t it?)

I kept that up for a few years, but I get so that I like to mix things up from time to time. At some point during the pandemic (I’ve completely lost track of exactly when…it’s all a blur, as you can probably imagine), I decided to migrate my blog to a different host after using WordPress.com for several years. I also wanted to create a different name and move on from Scenes From The Fourth Row. For that, I just used my name as my domain. That was easy enough. (That domain name will still get you to my homepage.)

After bouncing around to three different website hosts, I ended up right where I’d begun a few months before, at WordPress.com. Sometimes change works out. Other times, not so much. Now I know.

When I (re)signed up with WordPress, the plan I chose came with one free year of a domain name. I didn’t really want or need a new domain name, so I didn’t use it…at first. After being badgered by WordPress emails for a few weeks, I finally relented and decided to come up with a new, second domain for my new (old) site.

I’m really not the most creative person in the world. That, along with the fact that most “normal” sounding web domain names have all been taken, coming up with a new name was a chore. After sitting on my Chromebook for thirty minutes trying to come up with a good domain name, realizing that ALL of the names I wanted to use were taken, and getting really close to throwing my computer across the room (not really), I stopped. I took a deep breath. I asked myself two questions.

1) What IS my blog? 2) What is something that I really like or that describes me well?

Looking at my old posts, my blog is just a bunch of stuff, mostly about me, that I felt like writing and sharing over the course of several years…a chronicle of life stories in a manner of speaking.

When I asked myself the second question, well, I really, really like peanut butter. I go through multiple jars a month by myself. (Peter Pan, crunchy…in case you were wondering.) Would that be weird to put in a domain name? Yes, but I’m good with it.

So the combination of my two answers turned into Peanut Butter Chronicles, because, why not?

Once my free year is up, will I renew the name? I have no idea. I’ll worry about that later.

Oh, one more thing. My son Googled “peanut butter chronicles,” and found that there was a short film of the same name made a few years ago. I haven’t watched it yet. It’s about an evil jar of peanut butter (seriously). That would definitely give me nightmares.