It's My Blogiversary!

I guess that's what you call it, right?  I was off to a singularly inauspicious start one year ago today. Stats show 67 posts for the year, which is about one and a little-less-than-a-quarter each week.  Of course, I wasn't anywhere near that consistent.  The posts have come in clumps, bunches, fits and starts.

I remember thinking about starting a blog for months before I actually made myself put it together.  First, it took me a while to decide on a name-- I went through many possibilities, including "Extemporanea!" from a line in the Dorothy Parker poem I mentioned in this post, because I thought it would be so original.  Then I found out that it had already been used by other bloggers who may or may not have been fans of the Algonquin wits of the 1930's.  I moved on with a heavy sigh.  For a while, I considered "The Journal of Reduced Circumstances," but finally decided that it sounded too academic, and somehow, too Dickensian, to attract the readers I was hoping for.  One night, while I was reviewing possibilities during a routine bout of insomnia, "Ordinary Good Fortune" popped into my head, and kind of stuck.  It seemed to catch the every day aspects of life, and the more ethereal moments too.  I was hoping to touch on both in the blog.

The rest was just a matter of figuring out how to put it on the page.  How long was that process?  Well, let's just say that I had initially aimed for the start of the blog to coincide with the start of the year, but I'm writing about this blogiversary on February 1, 2014. So, you do the math--  if you want to, that is, because here on my blog, you don't have to do the math. (Unless you like math, and then, by all means, be my guest.)  

Have I fulfilled all of my blogging dreams and aspirations this year? Well, no, because blogging has turned out to be like all of the rest of the projects and undertakings and endeavors in my life:  not quite what I thought it would be.  I thought, for instance, that I would write more about cooking, with recipes included, but actually making the recipes intelligible, then taking pictures of actual food so that it looks somewhat appetizing were two tasks that have thus far proven themselves beyond my skill set. Ditto for craft projects. I may still do that kind of thing some day, because I would like to keep the blog going, and I hope that I will keep improving. 

But I'm not going to make either of us any promises today.  Instead, I'm just going to be happy that I've worked on this for a year, and that I like how a lot of the posts have turned out, and that many of you have commented and let me know that you liked them too.  That has meant a lot.  It has been extraordinary good fortune, in fact.




*I picked the "Celebrate" image. above, because it appears on a first class US postage stamp, which is just the kind of self-referential  "in-joke" I like to find when I read a blog regularly.  You're welcome.