Five Years!

This week marks five years since I began blogging with my first post having been published on February 9^th 2013! It is hard for me to believe that I have come to you for the past 260 Sunday mornings with what I hope has been for you, mostly enjoyable posts (click here for an explanation of why on Sunday mornings).

And for my fifth anniversary, I decided a new web theme was in order. I hope you like the new look and will find it easier to navigate. When I started, I never realized I would have this many posts so a new scheme seemed in order.

For this fifth anniversary, I went back through and reviewed all my previous blog titles. Before I started blogging, I had come up with a list of about fifty topics to write about and over the years, this list has continued to grow with now over 200 separate topics listed, some of which spanned over multiple posts.

When I look at my topics by category, I see that I have mostly written about my Memories, almost half of my total posts.

And this should come as no small surprise as I started this blog to tell many of my stories to my children so they would have them (and before I forgot them, click here for more details). It is also nice to know that these stories will be available for my grandchildren as well; at least once they learn to read.

The second main topic that I have written on is Travel, comprising over 20% of the total. Each year I post about all my travel for the prior year (Travel 2017 will post next week) and thanks to teaching for over 20 years in a lot of different places and having kids living on the West Coast, I have gotten to travel a lot. Many of my trips make it into their own post adding to the total. I know some of my readers stop by specifically for those kinds of posts and when I review your own travel blogs, mine pales in comparison. But thanks for stopping by.

As I perused my blog titles, I also realized that I had actually written quite a few on good books that I have read over the years and these were lumped in with a couple of different categories. So for this year, I created a separate category for books and went back and re-categorized all of those posts to make them easier for those of you who primarily stop by for book reviews.

My next most prevalent category has been “At Home” which includes many outdoors projects as well as special occasions celebrated at home.

Another category, which has garnered a number of posts, is “Entropy”, a topic familiar to any scientist like myself. And consistent with its definition, these posts have included a wide variety of random topics. What blog by a scientist would be complete without a category for entropy?

Over the five years that I have blogged, there have been times when I was worried that I was going to run out of topics to write on. And as a result, I typically write posts several weeks in advance so I don’t end up on a Saturday night with “writer’s block” and no fresh ideas to create for the next day. Being an early starter, at times I have had finished posts scheduled for publishing as much as 12 weeks in advance. So without the pressure of a deadline, I am often amazed at the ideas that suddenly pop into my head allowing my creativity to run wild.

So for another year, my plan is to come to you each Sunday morning with what I hope you will find as interesting and creative posts. As I write this particular post, I have my next ten posts already written and scheduled. Having retired in 2017, I also should have more time to write which will help me explore my creativity and my memories even more.

So Thanks for coming along for the ride so far. I hope it will continue to be an enjoyable journey for you.

Here’s to another year. Cheers!