Ten years

Tomorrow's kinda... big. I mean, big in a small way: big to me, but just a regular day to everyone else.

10 years ago tomorrow I decided to do something that would change my life.

Not, of course, that I knew that then. I'd met a guy, we hung out, and he introduced me to blogging. I went home, looked on the interweb, and thought, hey, wow, this is me. This is what I want to do. I want to write cr*p on the interweb and have other people read it (little did I know what hot water it might occasionally get me into, but that's another story.)

I'd been working on the (late lamented) Industry Standard (with some web-literati who've gone on to do great stuff), we'd closed in a puffball of glittery dot-com-bust, leaving me with a strangely friendly payoff, a laptop, and more than a little time on my hands.

Of course, as is the way with these things, my free time didn't last long: I was approached by former colleagues to do all kinds of consulting work, and I was briefly feted as someone who'd carried on making money as the ship went down (I was on the commercial side), so I'd already started working, but from home, doing my own thing, my own time, my own...

I checked out Luke's sidebar, read some other people's stuff, realised I had something to say (although in a fairly ad hoc and later-non-marketable way, but hey).

So I started blogging. I knew nothing about HTML or CSS, but did a bunch of web tutorials, asked the nice people on the internet to help me out, and make a retro-Edwardian-green website - strangely prescient of a Farrow & Ball colour we painted our front door ten years later - where my identity was truly hidden (oh, how times have changed) and my thoughts were out there for all.

And I met people. And I hung out online. And I hung out in person. I met really interesting, educated people who could write, some hilariously, and were smart, and because it was still pretty early blogging (although not as early as some, of course), it was kinda intimate.

I went to blogmeets. I went to Xcom aka the Festival of Extreme Computing. I went to Party in the Park and although I didn't know it then, I met my future (now present) husband.

On a summer's day (at Xcom) in the Camden Centre, a man who likes to be known as LMG on the internet bought me a drink and... ten years down the line we're married and we have a lovely little boy (whose first word was "batman") and... we've been on a long journey. But together.

It wasn't love at first sight (although it was like-at-first-sight). D became an acquaintance and then a friend, then a boyfriend, and now.. the love of my life. The bloke who knows that my idea of perfect blogiversary gift is a handcarved trivet in the shape of a seventies knife and fork, and that the (Edwardian green) kitchen is the most important room in the house, and is a great father and amazing husband and... ok. He offers great technical support. Which my family is very happy to have married into.

So this is a long way round of saying hey, it's been ten years. I'm kinda full circle because at the beginning I wrote loads but no one read me, and then for a while a lot of people read me. But now I think it's kinda back to no-one, which is fine (apart from you, of course). And I've waxed and waned, been prolific and not. I guess I've written well over a million words on this blog, and it's made me a better writer, for sure. And for a while it was a photo blog, and then this year it was mostly a property blog and now... it's just me. And D, and J.

Wow.

Ten years. I've come a long way. I do a lot of things (I work, and I'm a mummy and I try and keep on top of the domestic stuff, and I volunteer in my local community and... ) but the biggest thing I've ever done is get up one sunday morning, go to Kings Cross, meet some geeks, have an orange juice with a bloke from Kings Lynn and... well, the rest is history.

Thanks for reading (I'm not leaving, although I can't promise to be here as often as when my life was less complex, I just think it's nice to thank people every ten years), but thanks... most of all to D. You saved my life. I love you.