Just karasstories.com For Now

Boy have I got a mess on my hands. My precious blog that I have loved and adored for over 5 years now is giving me the worlds biggest headache.
I clicked on my blog last night only to realize something was terribly wrong with it. After frantically searching through blogger and GoDaddy I realized my domain name had expired. I was automatically irritated since google failed to send me an email notification letting me know it was time to renew it. They've been so good about that in the past. Like, I don't know when it's time to renew it so I'm going to need an email reminder please and thank you. Thankfully my blog was still intact through blogger so I knew I wasn't going to lose any of my hard earned blogging material I've done the past 5 years, just my domain name www.karasstoriesblog.com. No biggie, I'll just buy it back. Or so I thought.
That is until I was on the phone with GoDaddy until 1 AM last night and the customer service rep discovered Anton from Budapest swept in and bought my domain name from me the second it expired. Apparently there's people out there who do this. They search the internet looking for sites that get a lot of traffic and the second their domain name expires they buy the name then try to sell it back to you for an escalated price. I'm livid. LIVID I TELL YOU!!!
So I email this Anton from Budapest and ask him to sell me my domain name back to me. The name I've had for 5+ years. He hasn't responded yet. And who knows how much he'll want for it. The GoDaddy guy said he's seen anywhere from $15 to $3000!!! Who are these losers and why do they think it's acceptable to do this to people?
In the meantime, I decided to buy www.karasstories.com and have this little blog set up through a new domain name. If Anton from Budapest ever responds and will sell me www.karasstoriesblog.com for a reasonable price I'm going to buy that name too.....And just have a zillion domain names and have them all redirect to my blog so this never happens again!!!!
(Ugh typing all of this out is making me just even more angry)
It's like my Dad said when I called him in a panic this morning "I've got a mess on my hands and there's nothing I can do about it."
To say I'm frustrated is an understatement. I'm grateful that I didn't lose my actual blog but it's really frustrating that I'll lose some of my readers. Hopefully I can get my original domain name back so I can put this mess behind me. In the meantime, if you want to read Kara's Stories you'll have to now go to www.karasstories.com.
Let this be a lesson to all bloggers out there. Don't forget to renew your domain name and by all means make sure Anton from Budapest doesn't steal it from you.