Epilogue (from The Boy)

As many of you have learned, LimeyG passed away peacefully last April 8. I consider myself lucky to have shared eighteen wonderful years with her. She was simply amazing.

The following Sunday, April 13, we held a memorial ceremony to celebrate her life. Her friends and family told many poignant yet funny stories, we listened to music she loved (including the Pixies, Adam Ant and Celia Cruz) and finished by toasting her with champagne. It was as fitting a celebration of her life-affirming spirit as we could hope to produce.

I have found comfort in reading some of the earlier posts on this blog. I would encourage you to do the same. Carolyn spent a lot of time getting the writing and photos to her liking. We are lucky she devoted such care to this blog, for it perfectly captures her essence. To get you started, here are some suggestions:

• A three-hour lunch at Club Allard in Madrid, likely our best meal together;
• Duck in a can in Montreal, which was read at the memorial ceremony;
• A trip to York, featuring sausage buns, tea shops and sloe gin;
• Lunch in Guavate in Puerto Rico, featuring pork and lots of it;
• A wolf encounter in Ipswich, a reminder she had other interests beside food.

Finally, I would like to give LimeyG the final word, by sharing her final request:

In lieu of flowers, Carolyn has asked that you go have an excellent glass of champagne; tell your family how much you love them; buy yourself a book you've been meaning to read; do one nice, small thing for a stranger.

This Carolyn Grantham deserves props

I've set up a Google Alert so I know when my blog posts are crawled. And as I'm not the only Carolyn Grantham out there, some of the reports obviously refer not to me, but to my sisters-in-name.

This is one I wanted to share: a news story about Carolyn Grantham the hot-air balloonist taking developmentally challenged students for rides in one of the country's few wheelchair-accessible balloons.

See if you can read it without getting misty ...

I'm Spartacus! (Or Carolyn Grantham)

Until I was 19, I was the only Carolyn I knew. Never met another in all my formative years; not until I moved to London and started working at the University Library, where there were two--two!--other women who dared to share my forename.

Well, I could deal with that.

I never knew of any Granthams outside my family until I moved to Boston, where I discovered that there were some rather wealthy ones living on Beacon Hill. (Sadly, I'm pretty sure we're not related.)

Given the seeming rarity of a combination of first and last name, then, I was rather surprised to discover a veritable slew of people called Carolyn Grantham--none of whom are me--running around.

One is a llama farmer in Virginia.

One is a hot-air balloonist in New Mexico.

One is an elementary-school teacher in Chicago.

And there are others. Many, many others.

It makes me wonder whether, in a parallel universe, I'd be following a career path chosen by one of my namesakes.

It also makes me want to become a llama-farming, hot-air-ballooning schoolteacher, just to corner the market.

But mostly what it makes want to do is achieve search engine dominance.

I've been showing up on page one of Google for a while, thanks to press releases I wrote and posted on PRWeb, which list Carolyn Grantham (i.e. me) as contact person for both a special feature on poverty and prayer and a new Bible study product. But all those other pretenders to the CG crown keep showing up as well, mostly because they're more accomplished and worthy of public note.

Well, that's not what SEO is about, is it? Heck no!

So I signed up with some networking, social media, and "online identity reputation management" sites, to strengthen my position.

Here's Carolyn Grantham on naymz.com.

Here's Carolyn Grantham on LinkedIn.

Here's Carolyn Grantham (aka LimeyG) on the Copywriter's Roundtable Network.

And of course, as previously noted, Carolyn Grantham waxing effusive about SES Latino.

My goal is to dominate the first SERP. There can be only one Carolyn Grantham!