Happy Blogiversary to Me

~And a very Happy Birthday to Lynn & Velia~

Whatever will you buy me?

It's the paper anniversary of course (or clocks by the modern calender) but what does that mean in a virtual world? Some extra bandwidth? Some free cool graphics? Ya right. So I'm thinking cupcakes.... ya, cupcakes will do nicely. Thanks in advance dear sweet husband.

Yummy!

How I came to blog

I first met the internet when I met Calvin at MUN in 1992. It was a text-based world of newsgroups full of academic information & lots of porn where it would take an hour to download a picture. Not that any of the computer science geeks were downloading porn - it was mostly pictures of Deanna Troi from Star Trek TNG. We all know there’s still tons of porn but it’s also now this insanely vast network of billions of people & it just boggles my mind trying to comprehend its size. Sort of like the universe or even the solar system in that the scale is just too overwhelming to really truly understand. So since 1992 I’ve spent more time on the information superhighway than is probably good for me but like some bad addiction, I’ll never be able to kick it. The last four + years I’ve been reading (lurking at) Freakgirl’s blog for a daily dose of infotainment. I still spend almost every day there for a little while so I don’t lose my edge over the hubby for finding things out first. As with so many other blogs out there now I find myself interested in her daily life & like some weird stalker on some level I feel like I know her. (Yes I know I am sort of pathetic.) Anyway her site broke my blog virginity & I was hooked.

The links (oh the links will always get you people!) would show me things & take me places I’d never been so I felt like I was on some whirlwind tour of life or rather, other people’s lives. It was fucking great. At the same time I would also spend hours lurking (after working of course!) & sometimes posting at on-line message boards related to reality tv & wedding planning since Calvin & I decided to finally have a par-tay. I then started our website as a way to help guests navigate our upcoming wedding day since so many were coming out of town. I used Front Page to make it & was proud of myself for being able to figure out most of it & be able to tweak some the the html code plus make my own graphics. After the wedding I attempted to change it into a photo blog but it got way to much to handle with the amount of pictures I was taking & the way I was going about it with Front Page so I gave up & just let it stagnate like some forgotten project out there in the wild frontier of the web.

When we were trying to pregnant I went madly searching for info & found the Fertility Friend website where I could track my cycles & oh so wonderful things like cervical mucus & what was stupidly termed “baby dancing”. You’d think a website devoted to mucus & blood would have the balls to call it what it was but I guess s-e-x was an offensive term. (Like baby dancing isn’t – gimme a break!) Then I finally got knocked up & started my mad Googgling about anything & everything related to pregnancy. I thought to myself, hey since there’s blogs related to everything else there has to be something out there on being pregnant. Somehow I came across A Little Pregnant & was suddenly voraciously reading infertility blogs with more than a little bit of guilt. I could sort of relate because it wasn’t nearly as easy getting pregnant as I thought it would be but I counted myself so very lucky that I never had to deal with some of the stuff they were going through.

Somwhere along the way I stumbled across Milenka's Blogroll (it seems changed now, the link I had before had them categorized into sections like Infertility, Pregnancy, Moms, etc.) & found a few pregnancy journals & blogs so I had proof that they were out there. Plenty of them were what I'd consider pretty cheesy & full of fuzzy cherubic angel baby graphics which I guess are ok but not really my style. Then there were the others that seemed to tell it like it is, the real truth about puking, swelling hands & feet, weird stabbing pains & the paranoia of having done something bad to your growing baby because all you ate was McDonald's cheeseburgers & ice cream. Finally I had found the crowd I wanted to hang with but was more than a little intimidated so I hung back on the sidelines a little while longer lurking & biding my time.

That's probably when the heartburn started & the need to get the pain off my chest. Plus I figured this was the easiest way to keep family far & wide up to date on the bun in the oven. What to call it...... hmmm.... bun... oven. There's a bakery called Bunsmaster plus the remembrance of this made me giggle. What can I say? I'm easily amused. (I just googled bunmaster & found myself first followed by this - oh my god don't click on the link. No don't do it. I warned you.) And so the blog was born with a photo of orange flags in Central Park under a very silly title. Looking back I could have written more. I could have written better. But here I am still typing away whether I have the time or not because now it's so much more for me. If I don't let it out the release valve on my sanity will pop & then you'll all be sorry.

So thanks. Thanks to family & friends who took the time to read about my stretch n' sweeps, my late night heartburn & finally, after 42 & a half weeks of pregnancy, the Doodlebug's arrival. Thanks for sticking with me while I complained about the burning boobs, the screams (though apparently we have it good), the purple boobs, the apathy, the refusal of boobs & the horrible micro-organisms attacking my boobs. Apparently this blog is mostly about boobs. Take that Google search engines, though it might give the person who was looking for info regarding Canetsen on a cat some paws for thought. Get it? Paws....

It's stupid crap like that you keep coming back for isn't it?

And the photos. Always for the photos.

Now where's my damn cake people?!