Fifty-two weeks but who's counting

This week marks my first anniversary as a blogger. That's 98 posts by my unofficial count, not including this one. Yeah, yeah, big deal, says the outside world, I just feel I should mark the day somehow.

With lots of encouragement (I get by with a little help from my friends), I started slowly, with three posts the first month and five each of the next three months. I had in mind making one post per week. After talking to Mr. Gutman, an early mentor, something opened up, and out came seven posts in March. Then I backslid to three in April and four in May, came back with seven in June, and went nuts with twelve in July, eleven in August, thirteen in September, and fourteen in October. The numbers seem to indicate that I'm getting into it.

The increase in quantity says nothing about quality, of course, but I'm enjoying putting fingers to keyboard, if only as a test of what odd contents of consciousness surface during this lap around the sun. It would be a better, more random, more valid test if I wrote every day, as the serious bloggers do, then there would be a more complete record of the minutiae occupying my brain while other people are doing important work. But who wants that? Or I could compartmentalize by subject and produce a separate blogs on politics, family, gardening, the arts, religion - no, I don't think so - there aren't enough categories and there's too much overlap in my interdisciplinary (jumbled) liberal arts (pseudointellectual) mind.

A couple of observations might be worth making. My low level of technical savvy is apparent in the long, slow learning curve by which I've added elements to my blog. Pictures finally appeared, but not frequently, and lately there have been more links, but still no jazzy audio or video posts. Primarily a verbal learner, Professor Gardner. As my encouraging friends and co-workers have pointed out, the wordsmithing craft of it is at least half the point, as I painstakingly revise and edit paragraphs about topics like a movie, a dream, the weather, or what I had for supper. Really earthshaking stuff, kind of like the sophomore creative writing major who really wants to write but has nothing much to say. Portrait of the artist as an old dog. Definitely a late-bloomer, Professor Piaget.