It feels kind of weird to be celebrating anything right now, but I figure that I should focus on any positive thing that I can. And I guess talking about writing 500 posts isn’t exactly celebrating – but it does feel like a huge milestone that I want to acknowledge!

Writing this blog was something that I did kind of on a whim, after a summer conversation on my deck with a friend. I had toyed around with the idea before, but after that conversation, decided that I should just… do it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I still feel that way a lot of the time. So it’s a little hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I’ve written 500 posts here – I could never have even imagined writing that many posts that day on the porch.

Sometimes I’m so excited to sit down and write, and have so many thoughts that I want to share… and sometimes I sit here, wracking my brain to come up with something that I think other people would be interested in reading. I think that’s going to get even more interesting in the next few weeks/months – there definitely won’t be any sharing of places I went, or things that I went out and did. But I’m kind of excited to come up with things to write about now, and think (and hope!) that more people will be reading blogs now that our lives are centered around our houses.

I also think that this pandemic is going to change the world and the way that we live our lives when this is over. I’m not a journaler, so this is the closest that I’m going to come to capturing what it’s like right now, and how things change. Living through this is going to change us. And I don’t just mean the immediate things – the willingness to make plans and see people, to make up for what we’ve been missing out on – but I think it’s going to have a larger-scale impact than that. I just don’t think we can live through something this major and then immediately go back to our lives like they were before. So I’m glad to be documenting it in some way.

So here’s to the first 500 posts, and hopefully, the next 500, too. I continue to be so honored that you’re here, along for this ride with me!