I missed it!

 Oh no! I was thinking that the anniversary of my blog was coming up, and counting back, I realized that this is year **20** for the blog. 

The anniversary was yesterday. Womp womp. So I missed it. (Is my blog going to sulk, now, because I forgot our anniversary? I mean 27 IS divisible by 3....*)

Yeah, well. I've been distracted. Getting over a bacterial infection, trying to keep all the balls in the air including a few I'm not responsible for, worrying about the covid test...

The blog has definitely changed over the years. In the very earliest days, it really was more of a weblog - in the old sense, a catalog of links I found that I thought were interesting. But eventually I realized other people were more plugged in and more clever than I about finding links, and so now I don't link very often to things, unless it's someone else's writing I'm quoting. 

Then, around 2005-2006, the heyday of the knitting blogs (which actually may have been earlier, but) and when I was part of a knitting blog blogring, and we regularly communicated back and forth, and people quoted each other and OH that was so nice, and I miss it. Nearly all the knitting blogs have shuffled off into the night now, though - either their authors grew up, got married, had kids, and found themselves too busy for it. Or they got a job where even having much of an "unofficial" online presence was discouraged. Or they started writing books and the like, and why dispense milk to the masses for free when you can expect them to buy it in cartons? Or they got bored with it. Whatever.

I really do miss the heyday of hobbyist blogs. There are still a few, but a lot of them tend to be about hobbies different from mine, or writer's blogs, or classical-music enthusiast blogs, and I enjoy those, but it's not quite the same as someone doing the same things - sometimes even knitting the same pattern - as you, and you can share information and inspiration back and forth.

Also people used to comment more freely than they do now. I try to make the bar as low as possible without just allowing a free-for-all (I think unmoderated comments would very quickly fill with horrible spam; there have been some recent things I deleted because it was clearly a bot dropping links that had nothing to do with my blog). 

And I know for me it's been different since 2019. That year was the start of the Big Shocks in my life. (Well, really, early 2018 probably was, when a friend from church died absolutely suddenly and I found out a Saturday afternoon after a hard day at the Science Olympiad). And of course, the ongoing pandemic, where I've done far less and kind of turned in on  myself more, and I've made fewer things (because it seems like.....when you don't leave the house all that much, you really only need the same four sweaters, especially in a warm climate like mine, and as the number of fellow-knitter and fellow-quilter bloggers have declined, and comments with it - well, I've lost a bit of the "oomph" I once had for working; I find I can't just work in a vacuum as happily as I once did. Oh, I'm not blaming other people: that's a development that's on me, and I need to once again find my joy in doing something where only I ever see it. 

So I keep plugging along, and I guess at least a few people keep reading, even though I know I've been boring and repetitive all these months. I guess despite all my caterwauling about having given up hope of life ever getting better, I guess I do still cling to a faint hope - that case counts drop and stay dropped, that there are more social opportunities to suit someone like me here, that my inspiration for the things I once did will return, for new local friends to do stuff with, and maybe for reasons and opportunity to do a little traveling again.

One thing I admit I really crave - and have, for a long time, but the pandemic really showed me how much I did - is a sense of community, of being among like-minded and like-feeling people. I think part of the reason I remember graduate school happily (a lot of people do not) is that there was a community there - I mostly got along well with the other people who passed through my lab, and I was friendly with people from other labs, and from time to time we'd hang out and do stuff, whether it was little things like walking down to the old Babbit's used-book store to see if they had anything interesting or bigger things like organizing a weekend hiking trip in a state park somewhere nearby. Oh, not every weekend and not even that often, but there were THINGS. And there was the hope of THINGS in the future. I don't have friends like that currently (what someone called "running-around friends") and that makes it difficult - everyone is either busy, or is in a health/disability status where something like going hiking would be off the table. 

And yeah, perhaps part of the reason I keep up the blog is the hope for finding a tiny bit of community (through the form of comments, I guess, though perhaps once or twice I got the chance to meet someone who initially I knew through blogging). This world is so fractured. It would be, however, infinitely worse for me right now withOUT the internet; spending seven months fundamentally cooped up in my house in 2020 would have been very bad without the ability to virtually "talk" to people online. 

And who knows? I guess if I hold on to that tiny kernel of hope maybe eventually it will grow into something real and I'll find some local or semi-local groups to do stuff with, or I'll find my inspiration again, or actually complete a sweater....

(*obscure "Bob's Burgers" joke, from one of the early seasons)