Tonight Rejaw is shutting down. Maybe some of you haven’t even heard of it. But I know the people that will for sure read this know all about it and are at least as sad as I am about it.

When rejaw started up last summer, my husband heard about it and told me he was signing up and I should too. I reluctantly joined and was really not sure what I’d gotten myself into. I felt very left out in the community at first. Everyone interacting with my husband seemed to be some form of techie computer geek of one breed or another. But in time as I kept interacting, I got to know the less geeky sides of these people that could talk in programming languages with my husband that I could grasp only to a point with my own very limited knowledge of that stuff.

Then we encountered my dear friend Gwen who jumped into a post of my husband’s about how silly it is when parents make their kids wear those goofy foam helmets when riding their bikes. She felt differently about the topic because Gwen rides a badass scooter around town. Everything about her was fascinating, and the more we talked with people on rejaw, the more fascinating people we met and became friends with. I’m not going to shout out to each and every one of you, but you all know who you are.

For some reason I never had success with getting my existing friends before rejaw to give it a chance. I get the impression they felt like I did initially when looking at the site, and didn’t think they would fit in. They would have fit in just fine, and I’m sad to say they missed out on quite an experience.

When rejaw first started, I had just begun my journey to lose weight. I had 66 lbs to lose (that’s the first big goal anyway, with likely another 20 after that.) I’ve lost 60.2 lbs in the days of sitting here conversing with those people and feeling inspired and cheered on by all of them. I don’t know if I’d have been able to keep the same drive if not for that. I won’t be giving up, either.

Shortly after rejaw opened, my daughter started karate as a white belt, and she’s now a badass, sparring orange belt. That’s my little girl. I never imagined myself taking karate as well, but that’s where I ended up, too.  I feel I’ve grown and changed as a person in this short period of time, and I thank all of you for being along for the ride. I feel like my family is closer and more content after my husband and I started playing with social media and making friends together with some completely amazing people.  We’ve now got most of our siblings on twitter with us, and the whole family just feels very close and together. It’s a good feeling, and we likely wouldn’t have ended up there if we hadn’t given rejaw a chance.

I won’t soon forget some of the insane memories we’ve made together. A good example of that is the night that TK the Turkish Firefighter stole Kelly’s trash truck and then made off with Gwen’s flying unicorn scooter in his smelly socks. The good times and huge laughs we’ve had are irreplacable. It’s hard to do in 140 characters, but I’ll be on twitter waiting for those moments to continue .