Random Pensées

A milestone reached!

This post represents something special to me. This is a milestone reached, a distance covered, a length traveled.

This is post number One Thousand. For around two years now, I have been filling my blog with whatever falls out of my head. I began my first post by noting:

My goal here is to create an outlet where I can comment on the things that piss me off, interest me, amuse me, or will do any of those three things to my readers. [Ed.: Mind you, I had no readers when I wrote this!] In short, this will be a general interest blog for catholic (with a small c) interests. I welcome your participation in my little experiment.

I think, modest as my goals were, that I have mostly achieved them. Additionally, modest as my invitation was, it has mostly been accepted. Indeed, the comments make it all worthwhile. I still wrestle with why I blog or what I get out of it. I am way past caring that for some unknown reason I feel compelled to share some of my thoughts with a planet full of strangers and a small mini van full of people who I have come to share a friendship with. I am, however, pleased that my blog has also become a place where I memorialize -- what for many must be mundane but for me are -- the daily joys of sharing the lives of my extraordinary children and wife.

And I am, as I said, happy to receive the comments even if I tell myself that I would surely just keep on writing without them. Surely, I would. Surely I would derive the same pleasure from the writing that I do when I receive the largely thoughtful and intelligent comments I am fortunate enough to attract. Surely I am not lying to myself.

So, although I have said it before, thank you for the comments you leave. I am very appreciative of them.

One thousand posts seems like an awful lot to me. For a while there I thought maybe I was running out of things to say, running out of inspiration, losing my juice. My site stats bore silent sentinel to this as I have seen my average daily hits drop by a third. But recently I feel like it is all slowly creeping back in -- the pleasure derived simply from writing and expressing my thoughts, the having of the thoughts worth writing about, the caring. And the hits are slowly coming back up again. And the comments are still worth reading. So, I think that I pick option (A) on the menu: I will continue this little experiment and keep on writing.

And I will keep on writing here on MuNu where, courtesy of the gracious hosting by Pixy and thanks to the kind invitation from Helen, I have found a home and a place within a community of writers who I respect greatly. MuNu is a fabulous world and, if you haven't, I urge you to explore the MuNu links on my side bar. You will be richly rewarded by the experiment.

So, as numbers go, this is post one thousand, as I expect you have gathered. I am a bit humbled by what comes next. Many of the thousand were written elsewhere but since the first post I have put up here at MuNu, I have garnered some 3900+ comments. Since starting, I have had around 68,000 visits, many of them repeat offenders, of course, but we all know that recidivism is a problem not just for MuNu but for the world as a whole.

I guess I end this post here with a simple (as if I could do anything simply) thank you for sharing my life over the last 1000 posts. I think it has made my life richer and for that I am quite grateful. Here's to the next 1000!