Four Years Blogging

Wow, four years!

When I started this blog post on February 9^th, 2013, I never envisaged I would still be publishing these four years later and yet I have been coming to you every Sunday morning since then, 208 in a row now. I know a number of my loyal followers—and I thank you heartily—have been with me from the very beginning and have willing read each and every one of my muses, graciously overlooking my occasional bad grammar or poor sentence structure. But also along the way, I have picked up some additional followers who blog themselves and then there is the occasional reader that happens to find my topic of the week of interest to them.

To all of you I say a great big THANK YOU. It is with this knowledge of your continued reading as well as your encouraging and thoughtful comments that motivates me to write these weekly posts. For me, it is exciting to awake each Sunday morning and think of the possibility of people all over the world reading my latest post when it publishes.

But in spite of all your encouragement, I must admit that there was a time last summer when I didn’t think I was going to make it to this four-year anniversary. When I looked down my list of topics still to write on, there just weren’t that many left. As my existing readers know, I primarily started this blog to tell my story to my kids, my family members and my friends before I lost these old memories. This was my “Black Book” project (click here for an explanation). I also write on travel, vacations, reading, projects, cars, grand parenting, and sometimes just random things (my Entropy category). Many of these topics I saw that I had already covered extensively.

So I really began to rack my brain to come up with additional topics.

But then an event occurred that opened up a whole new category of exploration—the announced closing of my work site and as a result, my pending retirement. This along with a number of other new ideas that came to mind, as well as the milestone of hitting 60 years of age last year, gave me additional topics to script.

And write I did! At one point last fall, I had 16 posts written and scheduled for future weekly publishing with about six more drafted. I felt the goal of continuing my blogging through a fourth year was well within reach.

And then additional events transpired that I wanted to blog about soon after the event occurred.

Some of my previously scheduled posts followed a sequential order and so I began to have to shuffle multiple ones around to squeeze in new posts. Some posts could not be moved, as they were most relevant for a certain date (for example, Toys on Christmas Day). Before I knew it, after two or three shuffles, some of my existing posts got pushed out several months into 2017.

I guess from a bloggers perspective, this was a good problem to have. In fact the words you are reading now, I wrote over four months ago after I had written and scheduled almost all of my future posts through this February date.

By nature, I am an early starter; I never like rushing at the last minute to finish a project that is due. Even when I first began to blog, I typically liked to have my posts written and scheduled a couple of weeks in advance. That way, if something unexpected came up during the week that prevented me from finding the time to write, I still wouldn’t feel pressured to be trying to finish a post on Saturday night, just hours before its planned publishing.

The down side of this most recent strategy last year was that once I finished what I thought was a particularly good post, I sometimes had to wait several months to get feedback from my readers if it was in fact worthy. There were even times when I had to read my own post on Sunday morning just to remember what I had written.

So having reached this fourth year milestone, my plan is to continue weekly posts. However, it just seems at some point, I am going to hit a wall where nothing comes to mind to write on. But if I can just make it until I retire later this year, I will have even more time to brainstorm ideas. And with more free time, hopefully I will also be doing even more interesting things to blog about.

So cheers to another year of blogging!