Every Memory Of Looking Out The Back Door

I've been spending some time looking back - at blog entries and email folders. Can you believe it's been nearly a year since I started writing this blog? Back in October 2008 I made the first post here, having been inspired by reading the blogs of certain people I'd recently become friends with on Twitter - which itself was something quite new to me then. That first entry was written about one of my favourite songs of all time, and what I felt about it - reading it back, it does sound a bit second-rate school assignment stuff, but hey, I thought it was OK at the time. Actually, I still do. (And almost 12 months on, the video still works...)

Even after only a few months, it's interesting to read back some of the entries I've made here. I'm no Samuel Peyps, and it's debatable how many people other than me actually read this (my family, and GroupieGirl, don't even know of it's existence) yet I've still enjoyed writing the various entries herein. Even when I've struggled to get my thoughts into words, or when I've spent ages thinking "which track should I put in this entry" - indeed, sometimes the track has came first and I've tried to build the entry around that! I've been known to spend an hour on a single entry sometimes - all this for just a little blog!

And - let's be honest - some of the entries have been pretty dark and gloomy. Particularly in the run-up to what she & me now refer to as "the incident". It's pretty hard reading some of my entries, they can make me feel quite sad - but I'm not ashamed of a single word I've written, and I'm glad it's there to read through, because it's part of my life. Writing the blog entries probably helped me through those bad times. I've heard it say that people who write journals tend to only really keep them current during bad times, because when times are good they're enjoying themselves too much to make an entry - so maybe that's why I found a lot of emotion on these virtual pages.

Maybe what we as bloggers, journal keepers and the like should be doing is using these memories to keep things in perspective - things may be a bit sad now but they have been worse in the past and we dealt with them then OK... or things have been great in the past, so there's no reason why things can't be great in the future.

I've also been flicking through some old emails, something I've got rather a lot of. In fact, unless it's been caught by my spam folder and "recycled", I've not deleted any of the emails I've received since I got my current MacMini back in February 2008 - so if you've sent me an email (or received one from me) in the last 19 months, I've still got it. Yes, every single one. And some of them still make me smile :)

When I put my mind to it, I can write some pretty good material if I do say so myself... it's just putting my mind to it! And I intend to keep trying - I've been thinking about maybe a layout change or two, or maybe ending the rule of one post per day max, or not insisting every entry "finishes on a song" so to speak. Perhaps I'll make some changes at the beginning of 2010 - a new look for a glorious new decade maybe - that is if I haven't already jinxed it by saying that...

NICKELBACK - PHOTOGRAPH
(from the album "All The Right Reasons", 2005)