600

Well.

Who would have thought that my first post in 2011 would be my 600th?  Certainly not me.  When I started this little piece of crazy I was newly married, childless and temporarily professional while I decided on a PhD program. 

Since then, I've had a baby, made some new friends, lost some old (and good) friends, read a ton, learned a lot, made quite a few mistakes, but only some of them repeatedly, learned how to sew, knit, crochet, and make cinnamon rolls.  I've developed a boat load of new recipes, I've become obsessed with Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, and World War 2 documentaries.  I've moved twice.  I've bought a laptop and started a freelancing business.  Chris and I took trips to Boston, New York, Western Georgia and the Blue Ridge mountains and Savannah (more than a few times).  I flew out to Seattle and then to Santa Fe, NM.  I've been sick, I don't even know how many times, and only hospitalized once!  I've blogged about disappointment, frustration, anger (poorly managed), exasperation, but also humor, epiphanies, lessons learned and indescribable joy.

I've contemplated deletion and abandonment more than once.  A lot more than once.

But I've never quite been able to do it.  And I'm not sure why.  Half the time, I write, I post and then I forget what I wrote entirely.  I've had my own words hurled back in my face and have had NO recollection of having written them at all.  It's a strange relationship I have with this here piece of crazy.  I feel bad for spending time writing and posting, time that I could use to do something (anything) with a tangible outcome, and then I feel bad for NOT writing.

I've posted relentlessly, followed by long periods of unexplained silence.  I've seen my blog traffic rise from 3 to 300 and then plummet back down to...I don't even know.  I don't check the stats anymore.  I've decided it's too much like weighing myself.  I get obsessed with the number and forget about everything else.

I've regularly questioned my ability to churn out anything whatsoever that would be of interest to ANYONE to read.  And yet.  I get these amazing emails from some of you, some wonderful comments, reaffirming whatever I happen to have posted.  I can't tell you how much it's meant to me, and how many times you've pulled me back from the precipice of deletion.

I started this little piece of crazy, to be a window on our world--for our friends and family who don't live near, so that they can peek in and see what's going on.  And as I look back through the archives, that's exactly what it's become.  These wonderful fragments of our life together.  Not all of it happy, but honest all the same.