This Old Blog

Someone told me this morning that they were impressed that my blog is as old as it is, that not many who started in 2006 are still going. And here all this time I’ve been thinking I was a latecomer to the game, and that my blog was relatively young! I guess that speaks volumes about the transitory nature of the web.

Blogging was many years old by the time I gave in and started a blog. I didn’t want to. But I finally felt that I owed it to my clients to see what kind of value I could discover in it. One of the principle values has been a place where I can link everything that I do together, write about the things I feel like writing about, without it having to be about a specific topic. Unlike my websites, where everything is targeted to a specific audience. The blog is just me. It brings value to my business in linking all the parts of me together in one spot – where I can list every website I own, regardless of relevancy.

I think about two years into it is the first time I went back over the posts to see what I could reuse elsewhere. The first time I was astonished at how much I had written in that amount of time, and the first time I realized how long I’d been doing it. I’ve done that again, a couple of times, each time shocked at how old it really is when I stop to count the years. YEARS. In some ways, it only feels like months.

I am LDS (look it up at lds.org if you don’t know what that means). As such, I have a Patriarchal Blessing. It counsels me to “keep a record of your life’s work” for my posterity. My journals are dusty, and I haven’t put pen to paper for writing in more than a decade. I was pregnant with Adriene (now 18) when our family got our first computer (a gift from Kevin’s father). From then on, typing was easier than writing (well, once I learned to type…). Much of my life has been recorded in correspondence, and now, in my online presences, which are many.

I don’t know if that constitutes obedience to that personal counsel or not. There is much that has not been recorded – it is too sacred for public display. Many things I do not WANT my posterity reading after I’m gone. Many things I do want them to know. More, I think, than they can gain from these snippets of life interwoven with instructional materials.

If my blog is old, does that make me an old blogger? It had better not! I still have too much to do to be old. Today, I have a book to complete, which means I had better not invest all of my creative energy on this post. I need to save some for the chapter on Horse Mushrooms.