Anniversaries three and fourteen

Sunday was my blog-o-versary: My first post on this thing was September 13, 2006. Three years—I’ve had jobs that didn’t last anywhere near that long.

Blogging is still fun for me (which is why I’m still doing it), and while I’ve since branched out into podcasts and even the odd video, I still think of myself primarily as a blogger. It has something to do with the written word, I think.

Over the past three years, as I’ve noted before, I’ve produced a few posts I’ve been proud of, and only a very few I’m not proud of. Sometimes I’ve been surprised where a post ends up, or the way it got there, very different from what I intended when I started typing. Taken together, these posts tell a tale about what I’ve been doing and thinking about over the past three years.

Last week brought another anniversary: Saturday was the fourteenth anniversary of when I arrived in New Zealand as a tourist. Because of that, Nigel and I decided for sure we’d be together, and that I’d have to completely re-organise and reinvent my life. That was the date that the immigration service used to calculate how much time I’d spent in New Zealand, so for years it had a lot of significance because it related to my ability to stay in New Zealand.

Some six weeks after I left New Zealand as a tourist, I was back to stay, and the journey really began. That November date was the one we chose to focus on—and still do. It’s obviously more important than the other anniversaries.

We humans like to mark our progress through life by acknowledging anniversaries, and that’s really all I’m doing. Pausing to remember such things is good. The only bad thing, really, is that there’s always another one around the corner. But, it’s better to be able to have them then not…