Two Plus Years and Counting…

I was dinking around my blog this evening and noticed that it’s just past my anniversary! My blogging anniversary, that is. November 16th 2005 I wrote my first legitimate blog, and it was of course about beer. Wow. It doesn’t feel like 2 years necessarily – and I only have 149 (150 with this one) entries to show for it. That’s about one entry every five days or so right? Of course March of 2007 I wrote nothing – while these last nine days I have written one regularly.

I was introduced to blogging well before then, but had no idea what kinds of tools were available. I had made a website and posted political editorials using a regular HTML program. There was no community and no visitors really. I had one-person comment on one of my entries back then, who emailed me his comment. I was ecstatic! This was back before the last general presidential election in 2003 or 2004. Those pages have been long gone, though I still have the copies for sentimental reasons.

But it was that one fateful night on November 16th that my really good friend Andy showed me the link to Yahoo 360. We use Yahoo Instant Messenger in our daily work to communicate with other computer whacko-s all over the planet… and they had just added the integration feature – Andy found it, and shared it with me. After a day or two I was hooked.

I wrote a few blogs about corny stuff (they’re here if you go back and look for them) but had no one that I knew of reading them – until two people stumbled upon my space there and began to leave comments. OMG comments on your blog are more addictive than writing the blog in the first place! I became an even bigger attention whore than I was before, and tried to write something whenever I could. Those first two people were Elonna and Steve, two residents at Yahoo 360.

As with a lot of bloggers, I do it for fun. I can see how someone could make a living doing it with the right format and marketing – but I think once it becomes a job, it would lose its appeal. I’ve had ups and downs – times when I just didn’t feel like writing – times when I was depressed or just plain too busy. I’ve made friends, but not many enemies… that I know of.

When I came back from one of those breaks in online writing, I found out that Elonna had passed away. She had lymphatic cancer, which I didn’t know about, but was confirmed by Steve late last month. I hadn’t communicated with her since that month of March when I took a hike from 360 and blogging altogether, and I never renewed any ties with her. I have this void from the not knowing how she was, if she was in pain or if she was alone. I know she was lonely, though she had a lot of online friends. She spoke very highly of Steve, ModestJaws, IrishChick, Rachel, and a lot of others that I simply can’t recall – it was so long ago.

So anyway! Two years – WOO HOO! I’m going to try and do better on posting my thoughts, stories and other drivel. Thanks for reading!