???ille.net I typed as I finished the address. I glanced at the top right
corner to see the little logo spin. "What's taking so long??" I asked
myself.
Soon enough the page changed. I moved the mouse cursor directly over where
the word Members should be. I had long ago memorized where it was.
But instead of the normal Whyville black, the page background
was white.
My face frowned as I saw the
words in a larger font than the rest of the page: The page cannot be found. I
gasped in horror as I rushed to the refresh button. No effect... Again... I
thought maybe it was only temporary.
With no other choice, I went over to the long-abandoned
neopets.com -- I'd left that site in boredom compared to Whyville a year ago.
(My sister Lilymon left Whyville 8 months ago to head to Neopets, for some reason.) Anyway, I
spent a lot of time on that site learning what had happened there while I was gone.
Every day after that I spent trying to enter Whyville, failing and heading
to Neopets. I thought some criminals were on Whyville just as before.
Then one day I saw a message telling me that the Whyville servers were getting moved
and that I could give them my e-mail to get notified when Whyville returned.
I never bothered to check again, knowing Whyville was safe and so was my
account.
I took a trip to Vancover, Canada to meet some family who
lived just west of Alberta, the province in which I live. I was lucky enough
to receive time on the computer, and I rushed to Neopets instead of Whyville.
I played tourist with my cousins who are local to that area, and left the computer
to discover the world of "fun without a computer" that I'd lived with when I was a
much younger kid.
After the long boring car trip home that took 10 hours, I ran to the
computer and checked my e-mail, hoping that I had received the message telling
me that Whyville was up and running. No luck.
Finally, one day I went to the address bar and
typed http://www.whyville.net and waited. IT WAS BACK! I rushed in and heard
that this was the third day Whyville was up. I said hi to all my friends read my
mail and continued with my Whyville account.