The 800 and the Streak

On a warm January night (45 degrees!) I sit down to write the 800th post of my blog.

Happy 800 to me....when I look back at my early blogs, I see the progress I have made.

The blogging marathons I've participated in (four now, in the past year) have helped me develop the discipline of daily writing. (A life not full of caregiving an elderly person or caring for little children helps with the streak, too.)

I've blogged every day since late April of 2011, and I am going to have to make a decision pretty soon.

Do I want to keep the streak going?

Daily blogging, in a way, is like a treadmill.  You stay upright only as long as your legs keep moving.  If you stop moving, you slide off the mill and end up on the floor, on your butt.

If you slide off the mill, will you get up and get back on?

But on the other hand, do I have enough to talk about to keep going?

This is a "general purpose" blog.  If I go to a farmers' market, I blog about it.  If I see interesting wildflowers (well, not in January) I post pictures of them.  If I find an interesting fact about the Civil War, I talk about it.  If a madman guns down 13 people just blocks away from me, I write about it....in fact, that shooting, in April of 2009, led me to start the blog and is the subject of the first post.

One can even be cynical and say that if we had not had the flood in September that swept through my Triple Cities neighborhood (and many others) I might have not had as much material as I have been fortunate enough to find in the last 800 posts.  Truthfully, I would rather have a vibrant, thriving community than all that material. (and I "ain't done yet" with that material, sadly.)

I guess that is what has pleased me the most about the 800 and my streak.  This has become an Internet diary of the last (almost) three years of my life.  I hope one day I can look back.  Maybe I'll even have grandchildren who will read this blog one day. 

That's good reasons to keep up a streak, isn't it?

I just hope that Binghamton doesn't show up on CNN ever, ever again.

Why do you blog?