The AmeriNZ Blog is eighteen

The AmeriNZ Blog is now 18! Eighteen years ago today, I published my first post, ”I live in a land downunder. No, the other one…”. 18, huh? That means it’s old enough to vote (if only…) and old enough to buy alcohol in New Zealand—if it was a human, obviously. I began my AmeriNZ Podcast six months later, and technically I’m still doing both. The only one of my endeavours I’m not currently making any content for is my YouTube Channel—two out of three ain’t bad, right?

Yesterday was the 29th anniversary of when I arrived in New Zealand as a tourist, which was also when Nigel and I met in person for the first time. As I often say, those two anniversaries are the high points in what’s otherwise a terrible month for me (it’s not for nothing that my theme song for this month is Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends”).

This year has been a huge struggle for me in a lot of ways, and producing blog posts—and especially podcast episodes—has been difficult and even sometimes impossible for me to do. While I have a sense my challenges may be easing, and so, it’s likely to become easier for me to produce content for both, I’m not quite there yet. So today’s anniversary is a bit more mixed than normal, and less of an antidote to The Horrible Anniversary a week from today.

This is a marathon, I keep reminding myself, and not a sprint, but knowing and understanding that doesn’t ease my feelings of—what, exactly? Disappointment, I guess, frustration, certainly, and maybe even a bit of sadness. But I can’t change anything in the past—there are no redos. Instead, I’d like to just get back to some sort or normality as I define that, something I definitely think is possible.

All that aside, I’m still really thankful that Nigel talked me into starting this blog. More often than not, it’s been a great creative outlet for me, and it’s definitely been extremely useful for helping me remember things I’d forgotten, like some of the smaller events in my life over the past 18 years. There are still so many stories to tell, so many places to go, so much to find out. I think now, more than ever, the final line of my very first blog post rings true again:

“So pour yourself a cuppa, relax, and let’s see where this leads.”

I couldn’t have put that better myself—oh yeah, I did put it that way. And the sentiment is still every bit as valid.

Previous posts on my blogoversaries:

Anniversay Time (2007)
Blogoversary 2 (2008)
Anniversaries Three and Fourteen (2009)
Fourth blogoversary (2010)
Fifth blogoversary (2011)
Sixth blogoversary (2012)
Seventh Blogoversary (2013)
Ten years of the AmeriNZ Blog (2016)
The AmeriNZ Blog is eleven (2017)
The AmeriNZ Blog is twelve (2018)
The AmeriNZ Blog is thirteen (2019)
The AmeriNZ Blog is fourteen (2020)
The AmeriNZ Blog is fifteen (2021)
The AmeriNZ Blog is sixteen (2022)
Anniversaries 17 and 28 (2023)