I wrote the first episode of the Burrow exactly one year ago today.
Since then, I have written 329 of these letters to the ether.
329 essays. 329 times when I decided that my thoughts were worth sharing. 329.
That's a decent sized book.
Not that I started out to write a book.... no way, no how, it's just not me. I'm not a long term project kind of girl; crossword puzzles rather than jigsaw puzzles work for me. I started because the Cuters, perhaps seeking revenge for my insistence that homework came before going to the park, convinced me that there was an audience out there for my bloviating.
Seriously, when your 20-something children agree that "you are waaaay hipper than you think you are" it's time to sit up and pay attention. And so I did. And here I am. With my 330th post I thank you, blogospherians, for reading and commenting and sharing my life.
Please notice that I did not say "sharing my journey." It's important for me to maintain some small degree of separation from the world of reality tv.... for this is, in no small measure, reality writing.
I've written only the truth, without the embellishments for which my verbal communications are well known. I've been honest and truthful and, I hope, amusing, provocative and informative. I've made new friends out there (Hi, Nance!) and felt the love from old friends, who no longer need newsy Holiday letters since they know what I've been doing/thinking/feeling every day for the last year (Hey, FAMMB!). I've been passed around (Thanks, Artess/--E) to family and friends, I've been quoted (Thanks, Ronni) and I've learned a lot along the way.
I can now kinda-sorta-just-a-little-but-enough-for-right-now understand the HTML coding behind these beautiful posts. I'm self taught, at the moment, as the spacing on the pages above demonstrate with aggravating clarity, but I'm working on it. I'm not afraid to fool with my template, and I've managed to find and download widgets -- and that's a sentence which would not have been typed by me on April 13, 2009.
TBG has commented more than once over this past year that blogging suits me. He says that it taps into all the things that make me happy - writing, communicating, staying in touch, talking about my day to day stuff, taking pictures and keeping track of where I've been, reading and wondering aloud and making sure that the people I love know the things I think they need to know.
Sometimes I'm an embarrassment of riches, I know. I tend to instruct, regardless of whether the audience has asked for edification or not. I usually think that what I want to say is worth a listen, as my Zaydeh was wont to opine. I imagine that everyone is as interested in my garden and my mother as I am. And for the last 365 days I've been operating under the assumption that this is all true.
I'm not totally crazy - the SiteMeter at the bottom of every page reassures me that there are actually people out there clicking through to read my verbiage. I've yet to earn a dime from the ads; I think they make me look official so there they will stay. But there has been one thing I've earned -- TBG's respect. He has been gently teasing me over the years about all the businesses I've started and stopped once I got the stationary designed and the business cards printed -- all on my own computer and my own time, for which I would not charge myself, so we were never out of pocket on any of my absolutely great ideas which never managed to gain any traction after an intial flurry of activity (mostly from my side and never for a very long period of time.) This time, though, he admits that, while not strictly a business (for that I would have to earn a profit.... a scenario which is, as the citizenry of Anatevka said, far away from us) it is an activity worthy of a place in the pantheon of "what we've done with our lives."
Thanks for doing it with me.
Happy Blogoversary!