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I know it looks like I never bother with the blog much, but let me tell you, I’ve actually been blogging until the wee hours of the morning for a week now.‚ All, and I mean ALL the images imported from my old blog on Blogger were no longer working, so I had to go back and fix each and every one.

It turns out that if you right-click the broken image, you can cut and paste the address into a new window and see the photo. I did that for every picture and saved it to my hard drive. I like to have pictures that embiggen when you click on them, which means that I also had to save the larger versions of each picture as a separate file. Then I uploaded them onto this blog, which became a million times easier when I figured out that I could just transfer the files using the ftp site that comes with my service from Living Dot. (great service, by the way. Awesome support quick and friendly!) Then I had to go into each post and replace every picture, including the link to the larger version.

It took a long time. I’ve been blogging for almost exactly two years! (I started on August 31st, 2004) It’s amazing how much the simple act of blogging has changed my life. Not only do I have a pretty good record of the last two years worth of knitting, I’ve met or corresponded with‚ untold numbers of truly brilliant and inspiring people, been to countless parties and dinners and events that I never would have known about, I have a freaking book out, and even more than that, I’ve made some really great friends. I can’t even imagine what I else I could have been doing over the past two years that could have come close.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love these here internets. Where else could you amass such a group of funny and interesting people? Just think of the amount of “conversation” you’ve shared with bloggers you read. I tend to think of blogs as emails to people you want to keep in touch with. How many people are in your bloglines list? How many blogs do you read on a regular basis? The relationship that we as bloggers share with one another is certainly different that those we share with the people sitting right next to us on the train. But I don’t think that difference makes it any less valuable. Rather than stumbling around with the small talk you get trapped into with acquaintances, bloggers tend to get right down to it. Our personalities are out there, right alongside our brand new handknits and often times, our dirty laundry. I think writing allows people to express themselves more fully than just having casual conversations, so even casual posts tend to be more thoughtful than your typical “Hey, how ya’ doin’?” at the grocery store. And once you’ve had that thoughtful back and forth with someone, I find it gives you a leg up when you actually meet them in person.

It’s like a little sanity check sometimes, just to skim the blogs and see that people’s kids are thriving, brain surgeries are going well, bones are mending, chairs are flying off the back of trucks on the highway, people are going nuts dealing with crazy house crap or sometimes facing serious medical issues with themselves or loved ones. But everyone is determined to keep on keepin’ on. When you look at it as a whole, the blogging community is like a machine chugging along, recording daily life – the good, the bad, and the boring.

I don’t know, maybe this is why I was so addicted to the Sims. I just like keeping track of everyone, knowing I can pop in and say hi, even though we haven’t officially met. There’s something about the looseness of it all that I find fits me really well. I think many of us are aware of each other and know things about each other from our blogs, even though we’ve never met, maybe haven’t even corresponded. And yet we still have a strange kinship. There needs to be a word for whatever that is. Something other than creepy.