The Best 365 Days I've Ever Spent With My Pants On!

If you'll allow me a bit of self-congratulatory blowhardy goodness, I'd like to wish myself a happy birthday.

Yes, it was exactly one year ago today that I took up a dare from a friend (Friend: "Dude...your emails are freakin' hilarious! You gotta write a blog! Me: Are you crazy? That's like...in public man!") and first strung a series of quasi coherent sentences together, thereby announcing my presence to this here series of tubes. I had no idea how long I would keep it up, whether I'd want to, or if anyone would even read it. At the most, I thought it would be a cool way to scratch a literary itch that had been bugging me for a while until I got bored with it and that would be that.

But something funny happened on the way to short lived obscurity. I found myself having a blast. And the more I looked around the small corner of the interwebs devoted to our little game, the more I realized how good the writing was out there, and how passionate others were about producing it. I think I've enjoyed that revelation as much, if not more, than committing my own little scribbles to the electronic version of pen-to-paper. Thanks for that.

It has been a hell of a year. Along the way, I've made some friends, won some bets, needled our "enemies", taken things WAY too seriously, tried my best to entertain, been given the chance to express myself in a few other places and made more friends. I have to say, as hobbies go, blogging about a hockey team beats the living bejesus out of stamp collecting (er...not that there's anything wrong with that).

I've always told myself that the very second this starts to feel like a "job", I'm going to hang up my keyboard and vanish into the ether. But I'm not even close to that yet. So, to the 11,209 visitors to my little chucklehut in the past year, I'd like to offer a sincere and heartfelt THANK YOU! While I may have tried to do it without you, there is no way it would have been as much fun.