We Need Cake!

This is my little blog’s One Hundredth Post! It was almost a year ago that I created Ramblings as a way to share stories and images from last October’s month-long road trip. I liked how easy the blog format made it to keep friends filled in on noteworthy events in my life, and I decided to keep it going after the road trip was over. Gradually it has morphed from an infrequently-updated news site, through a brief attempt at writing “mass appeal” posts intended to reach a larger audience, through a painful but cathartic period where I needed to vent emotions that were threatening to overwhelm me, and into its current incarnation, which is basically just a daily glimpse into what’s going on with me and the kids.

Those “mass appeal” posts are still my most popular; every day people visit my site to read about keeping a live Christmas tree in a pot or how to grow decent watermelons (it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who is endlessly frustrated by that task) or which books are good for reading aloud to children. But crafting posts for the general public turned out to have little appeal for me, and I soon lost interest and stopped writing stuff designed to collect Google hits. Actually, as I recall I stopped posting almost entirely for a while there.

Then came all the marital separation drama, and apparently that makes for some fine entertainment because my readership numbers have been rising steadily since I started posting about it in April. I get more visitors in a day now than I used to get in a week.

And while I love the spiking hit stats as much as any blogger, I’ve come to realize that I would continue to post here even if no one came to read at all. The sense of community is wonderful, but at the heart of it I write because I can’t not write. Like almost every other blogger in the world I hope to be a published author one day, and this is where I practice my craft and hone my narrative skills.

So…if you’re new here, welcome! Make yourself at home, invite your friends over, help yourselves to the popcorn and Milk Duds. And if you’ve been here from the beginning…thank you for sticking with me while I was figuring out how this blogging thing works and what I wanted mine to be. Thanks for your comments, your emails and your encouragement. You all so totally rock.

Cake for everyone!