We Are Nine

I had a wonderful trip last week to the Oregon coast, staying in my SIL’s family beach house with her and our friend KK. We ate and drank, talked and talked, and watched a bunch o’ movies. It was fabulous. Even though there was quite a bagful of wine bottles to pack out to the recycling place when we started home I never felt any of us had overdone it. Until the morning Linda confessed she had lain on her glasses all night, and I had slept in my usual two cashmere sweaters – one wrong side out, and the V-neck one on backwards.

We had a very good time!

On Thursday morning I glanced at my online calendar and saw a notation: Blog Anniversary 2008. Did the math. My blog is NINE years old! Good heavens. How is that possible?

I promised myself when I started this thing that I could stop at any time. If it wasn’t fun then I didn’t have to keep doing it. I’m still waiting for the fun to stop! Over the years I've found that the few times writing did seem like a bit of a chore, someone would leave an especially nice comment. And I'd be good to go again.

I started wondering just how often I do go. Sometimes we get rained out, or travel, or something else comes up. Some weekends I go out more than one day if the ads look promising. So I pulled up my trusty spreadsheet and starting counting dates. Which was a bit boring and I may have lost count once or twice, but the final tally was in the neighborhood of 457 days in the past nine years have included thrifting. It's probably fortunate that I mostly confine things to weekend sales. If I were shopping in thrift stores no telling how often I'd go!

That consistency is the reason I find so many treasures. It's all about showing up, which is pretty true of most of life’s endeavors. But that gives me an idea. You know how people speak of their yoga practice, or their meditation practice? I think I’ll start casually dropping my garaging practice into the conversation!

My statistics program says this blog has had almost 672,000 visits so far. Thanks to all of you for coming along for the ride. And keep your seat belt buckled, because we’re heading straight toward number ten!