I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple weeks, trying to decide what I wanted it to be. It has a significance that is invisible to you, but has been looming over me as I watched the counter on my dashboard tick inexorably up… 996, 997, 998, 999, and today, 1000.
One thousand posts! It’s a milestone, although I’m not sure what kind. After all, no one is ever going to read all of them. The XML back-up file has 1.7 million words in it. That’s about 20 books worth of words, and although some of those words are the XML code, most of them are not.
Personally, I really wish there were a lot more of those words. I didn’t start blogging until 2006 and then I blogged very lightly for the first few years of my blog, I think primarily because I worried about sharing too much of my personal life in a place that business colleagues might discover. But one of the things that I love about my blog are the links that show up at the bottom of the post that tie back to some previous day. Sometimes the previous day, whatever it was, bores even me. But other times I love the serendipitous reminders of where I was and what I was doing on some past moment. And I wish so many more of those reminders involved an adorable toddler and a stubborn six-year-old and an entertaining eight-year-old. Yes, I wish I’d been a mommy blogger! I wish I’d cared less about what other people might think, about the possibility of being perceived as unprofessional, and more about what I would want to remember. C’est la vie, however.
I also wish I hadn’t lost many of the photos from old posts somewhere along the technological path. I know it happened when my last domain host killed my site and I had a transitional period on wordpress and then switched domain hosts, but knowing how it happened doesn’t bring those photos back. Some of them I might still have somewhere, but I am not going to drop into the major, major rabbit hole of trying to find them and re-post them on those old posts. That would be a fine way of killing some days, but I’d rather use those days more wisely, like, maybe, writing a book?
All that said, and more to the point, even I am unwilling to read the entirety of my blog. Skim some of it, sure; read the occasional post, yes. But not the whole thing. In recognition, however, of the fact that this is a post I will remember, and a post I will stumble upon in the future, and a post that will link me back to my past, I’m going to share some of my favorites, at least of the ones I’ve stumbled across in my browsing over the past few weeks. I’m not going to claim that they’re the best or even worth reading necessarily, but they’re ones I’d like not to lose in the sea of my next million blog words.
August 4, 2009: The two Floridas
December 26, 2011: Anatomy of a year (2011)
January 5, 2014: To the people who dumped their dog on my street last July
September 3, 2015: Dyslexia
October 31, 2015: Swimming and yoga
August 15, 2016: The eye of the beholder
March 2, 2017: Palmetto State Park
May 31, 2017: Best. Vacation. Ever.
February 6, 2018: Bartleby
May 23, 2018: Commencement and other things
I don’t usually ask for comments, but if there’s a post I’ve written that you remember particularly for some reason, I’d love to hear about it!
There are so many posts that resonate with me that I find it difficult to pick just one. Losing Bartleby was tough, sharing what you learned at the writer’s conference was excellent and reminds me that although I can put two words together, I don’t consider myself a true writer. Moving across the country for your son shows the depth of your love for him and for what you want for him. Learning to read will take him places he might not be able to go otherwise. Notwithstanding the pride he will have in himself after achieving that knowledge, he will be able to get a glimpse of what the ability to read can give a person. I’ll stop now — I always write way too much.
He is, of course, fully remediated by now — and getting a Master’s Degree in English! Still dyslexic, learning disabilities don’t go away, but a person who reads for pleasure as well as for knowledge. I’ll have to look for the writer’s conference posts, though — I remember them but I didn’t stumble across them in my browse, although I did find some other interesting writing-related posts! Thanks for the reminders 🙂 (Although you really can’t ever say you write too much when you’re posting a comment on a blog that has 1000 posts on it! Speaking of writing too much… )
ROFL here… Hugs to you … I don’t put tags on my blog posts and know I should, but I rarely have to go back to find a particular post. Still, I might have to one day get in that habit. I used to print all of my blog posts out, 3-hole punch them and put them in binders. Then after I had several of them I got discouraged, telling myself that no one would ever be interested in reading my ‘drivel’ so I shredded them. Arrrgh. should not have done that. LOL
p.s. to Learning Disabilities. I never realized I had any until I met my half-sister for the first time and she was a teacher for learning handicapped kids. She spotted my disability but said I’d learned to compensate for it rather nicely over the years. She never told me what my disability was, but I can admit that it’s a spacial thing… I have trouble visualizing how parts go together, which creates some real problems for me since I quilt!
I like the one titled ‘On Fear’ from 9/17/2017. I think the same way about fear. When I was a little girl my dad would say ‘things happen when you least expect them to’ so I would imagine every bad thing that could possibly happen before I walked out the door because if I was expecting it to happen it wouldn’t-right? Lol.
Ooh, thanks for the reminder! That was a good one and I hadn’t stumbled across it in my random dips into the past. That photo definitely brought back the frustration of my screen door and the beauty of the morning, though!
I haven’t known you all that long, and had read your posts from 2017 to the present. I don’t always comment, but I do read them. I like the way you are so honest with yourself! The post that impacted me the most was Bartleby, and we both know why. We love our babies, both two and four legged, and any loss is devastating. Reflection on where we have been is good, but I want to look at where I am going. Planning a trek to see my grandson in February, which will be an adventure!
Ooh, that is a great idea for my next post! I don’t think I’ve written about my 2019 plans yet? I might have to look and see whether I have, actually. But I’ve got big plans for this year and I am looking forward to them! It’s going to be a fun year! (It will include Montana, so maybe we can meet up!)
1000 is not enough. You need to keep writing lots more blog posts!