HAPPY NEW YEAR!! Okay, so I'm a little late with the New Year wishes but they say it is the thought that counts. Speaking of thoughts, 2013 marks my SEVENTH year in the blogosphere. (Sadly, this blog is one of the longest relationships I've ever had. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right?) As you know, I'm not one to make resolutions whenever the latest model of Baby New Year comes rolling down the block. I feel as though resolutions are too easy to break because all it takes is one person you know slacking off on theirs for you to suddenly feel like it's no big deal to ditch your own. But this year I've decided to renew a previous resolution regarding this here blog. I said a year ago that I wanted to try and write everyday and see what came out. I did end up writing everyday...but not all of it made it to the blog. But it was still an improvement over years past. I began this blog in September of 2007 and a lot was different then. I wasn't a father and I was in a not-so-great phase of my life. The purpose of this blog was to try and exorcise the demons one post at a time. I wrote 26 posts that year and 59 the next. I dropped off some in 2009 and only wrote 15 posts but rebounded nicely in 2010 with 83. The past two years have been off the charts in terms of posting; 178 posts in 2011 and 188 in 2012. In total, I've written 601 posts and published 549. I never would have imagined that this blog would grow to that extent, or that it would become such a lifeline for me. It is a place to share my victories, assess the state of my life, keep a record of the hilariousness my friends and family produce, and my place to vent. I truly do not know what I would do without this space, my own little private corner of the interwebs. And it's amazing to think about how this blog may never have even happened if not for an assignment in third grade.
I have always loved to write and I've often wondered if I was an author in a previous life. I'd like to think I was. I've always loved words and the power and meaning behind them. I don't remember much about parts of my childhood but I do recall the moment I fell in love with writing very vividly. I was in third grade and we were assigned our first big paper to write. It involved research and re-writes and everyone in class grumbled about having to do it, but I thought it sounded like fun (yes I was, and still am, that big of a nerd). I aced the assignment and was thrilled when our teacher revealed that we'd be keeping journals the rest of the school year. It was up to us to keep track of our writing and put something down at least twice a week. Guess who filled up his journal in a week? Okay, it was me. I drew pictures, I practiced spelling, I wrote about my day, and my mom still has this journal on her bookcase at home. It's funny to look back at it now and see what things I found earth-shattering back then. My teacher, bless her heart, was overwhelmed by how often I wrote but was also very encouraging and suggested I keep some paper and a pencil handy so I could write whenever I thought of something. I took the advice (yes, I also used to actually take good advice, believe it or not) and have never looked back. It's funny how that little suggestion a teacher made is still very significant in my life twenty years later. Into adulthood I've continued to keep notebooks and pens everywhere. Back to school sales are my scene and I load up on notebooks every year. My daughter may have to fight me for a good notebook at future back to school sales. Of course, technology has grown at an amazingly fast rate since I was a third grader. There are new ways to write now, few people seem to use paper and pen anymore and that's a shame. But I'm one of those people now more often than not. I remember always trying to keep written journals as a kid but never really succeeding. I would beg my mom for some fancy looking hardcover journal, convinced that if it looked official enough I would actually take the time to sit down and write. That resolve would last about a week and then I'd cast it aside with all the other journals I never wrote in. Even my first attempt at a digital journal failed miserably. I typed it up in a Word-esque program on my first desktop computer (with a whopping TEN gigabyte hard drive!) then promptly forgot about it and deleted it months later (because a ten GB hard drive does not hold much and I needed the space). It wasn't until college that I gave it another go, finding a site called Xanga. For some reason I still don't fully understand, this site was wildly popular amongst my classmates. This was when MySpace was still relatively new and Facebook was just beginning to appear on college campuses. I was actually able to commit to writing everyday, although most of it was mundane stuff from my everyday life. It wasn't anything people I didn't know would want to read, but I guess the same is true for this blog. That first blog eventually led to this one, where I have found a home for all of the fun, funny and fearful thoughts that run through my brain, and I'm incredibly thankful for that.
Once I settled here, I began writing all of my posts in Blogger, despite the fact that glitches on the site have destroyed some of my best blogs before they could see the light of day (one in particular from a few years ago about the nightmare of having been bitten by a child was pure genius. GENIUS, I tell you!). A friend who also blogs suggested I draft my posts in Word first and then paste them into Blogger. That was a great idea but I never could remember to do it so I continued writing in Blogger and lost at least a couple more great posts. One of the reasons I was excited to get an iPhone was because I knew there were apps I could write in, so I would no longer need to grab paper and pen to write down an idea. Blogger has an app but it leaves something to be desired, plus it makes it a gigantic pain to switch between my blogs. I used it for a few weeks before a friend suggested an app called Evernote. And I love it. It not only allows me to write in a very Word-like format but it also syncs my notes between my phone and my computer, so I don't have to re-type anything. I can write an entire post on my phone, sync it over wifi to my computer and then just copy and paste it into Blogger and publish. It's so flippin' easy. So my goal for this year is to not lose any posts to Blogger glitches and make sure I take the time to sit down and write full posts about all the subjects I want to write about. It's not like I'm writing anything groundbreaking obviously but I still want to commit to writing as much as possible. Here's hoping 2013 is fantastic for all of us!
