Today is my 10 year Bloggiversary!!!

It's hard to believe that it was 10 years ago today that I wrote my very first blog post.


The First Blog Post

I remember it well: Dick must have been working from home that day. We shared an office at the time, and he told me that he was starting a blog, and that maybe I should, too. I had a handful of friends who were blogging already,and figured I might as well jump on the Blog Bandwagon. Who knew I would keep up with it, and would still be blogging 10 years later?!

I originally thought that this would be a fun way to share things with friends and family (okay, mostly my parents) and to just jot down random thoughts. It was well-before the days of Facebook, and this was a neat way of sharing photos and daily happenings. It was also a fun way to document vacations and special events.

Ironically, I've never kept a diary. Somehow, this very public digital medium works for me. Go figure.

I'm still using blogger, just like I did when I wrote my first blog post on August 22, 2003. They've been bought by Google since then. I used to host my blog on my own domain, but my options became a little limited, so I started to host it on their server about three years ago.

It's pretty amazing to think that I've been blogging for a whole ten years. Who would've thought that I'd have so much to say. Granted, I may not actually be saying much, but it's fun to have an online journal with photos that I can reflect back on and share with the World.

It's been a fun ride, and my, a LOT of things have happened in the last ten years.
Some highlights:

I became obsessed with, and bought my MINI Cooper (named, MINI Driver, of course!)

We moved from Dick's Big Yellow House in the Mission to "His 'n Her Condos" in the Castro

Got engaged!

Got MARRIED!
(and showed some early photos from our wedding)

Cartoon Squash Baby! Part One and Part Two! Possibly the most funny blog posts I ever wrote. Long Live Cartoon Squash Baby!

Was mistaken as a hooker in Shanghai (Because, really - doesn't everyone have a hooker story?)

Was on the Home Shopping Network

Went to Vegas (more than a few times

Went to a few WGIs

Read all the Harry Potter Books

Had an Appendectomy

Had our bathroom remodeled

Said goodbye to our Grandpa Chan

Had our backyard remodeled

Said goodbye to our Big Cat, Marcel

Got my haircut

Saw the most Epic Green Day Concert Ever

Helped organize and attended the State Street Review Reunion

Went to visit Dick's Childhood home in North Carolina

Said goodbye to our Grandpa Chow

Turned 40!

Signed up for my first multi-day breast cancer walk, then started training with the Warming Hut Hotties!, and finished my first 3Day Walk

Flew to NYC for one night to see Billie Joe Armstrong debut on Broadway

Hosted a BUNCH of Halloween Parties!

Moved into our new home

Dick's broken knee

Became a fan of glassybaby then proceeded to Introduce all of my friends to glassybaby, too!

Dyed my hair blue

Started Drawing and Painting again, which was the start of my Renaissance Year.

Learned how to make Plum Jam

Donated a whole lotta Platelets and Whole Blood

Hosted some pretty awesome WGI parties

Closed my web design business after 16 years

Got gallery representation for my paintings

These are just a few highlights, of course!

We also did a whole lotta travel in the last 10 years!

travel highlights:

Shanghai
Tokyo
Spain with the Craddock AND Chow families!
London,
Yosemite with the family
Hawaii with a bunch of friends
Rome, Florence, and Venice
NYC and Boston
Dubai for Jimmy and Pavan's Wedding
Tokyo (again!) and Kyoto

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing my 10 year Bloggiversary with me! :)

A new blog record!

Since today is April first, I can now say that my blog had a record amount of posts in the month of March.

62 Posts!

Good Grief!

Who knew I had so much to say?

To be fair, 42 of those posts were from our trip to Japan last month, and I posted multiple times per day while we were there. (lots of great photos that I wanted to share!) I never posted these on Facebook. If you're interested, you can go to "Blog Archives" on the right side of this page, click on the little arrow to the left of "March (62)" and you'll see the long list of posts from the month of March.

But even without that, I still posted another 20 posts in the remainder of the month. Which almost averages out to one per day.

In the 9-1/2 years that I've had this blog, it looks like the most posts per month that I had before was 42. (that was in March of 2008, in case you were curious.)

I know I'm the only one who cares about this at all, but just thought I would share. :)

Blog Changes

Well, hello there! You've found the new blog! Fantastic.

So, I did a bit of research today, and decided to stick with Blogger for a little while to see how this new system works for me. I can't use FTP to save my files on my server anymore, but I can export my blog files, so that may work well enough. We'll see.

In the meantime, I've changed the template of my blog. I've used the last template since I started blogging way back in August, 2003. I think it was time for a change.

I chose a simple white template (Dick said, "well, it's white..") so I can keep it simple and clean. It'll also allow me to play more freely with the colors, and design, and I can add some images without clashing. :)

One of the nice things about making this switch is that now I have access to more templates, and a lot more options. I can put an image in as my header now, and I can finally add widgets (like a search function, labels, and my favorite: a cascade blog archive list!)

I've done away with my old haloscan/echo comments. When I started blogging, blogger didn't offer comments yet, and now they do. It was getting confusing having both, plus I had to pay for haloscan/echo.

So, all-in-all, a pretty easy transition. I may be playing with it more in the near future, but it'll work for now.

Any comments or suggestions? Let me know! :)

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://trinachow.blogspot.com/.
Please update your bookmarks. :)

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http://trinachow.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

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Blog Migration

Blogger is no longer supporting FTP publishing, so I need to make some changes around here. The transition will be happening sometime today.

If you usually read my blog through an rss feed, please be aware that this will probably change. I don't know what it will be yet.

I expect my new blog url will be blog.trinachow.com. The archives of my blog before today will probably remain here at trinachow.com/blog.

Hope this goes smoothly.

Back up, and running

It's good to have my blog up and running again! I just just been to the blogger discussion boards and there were several additional reports this morning, followed by a fix by one of the blogger guys. When I checked my blog immediately afterward, it had finally been published after being down for over a week. Yay. Hopefully, this won't be a temporary fix, and we'll be good to go!

It's not that I haven't been trying!

really, I have!

My blog has been down since New Year's Eve. Or, at least, that's the first time that I tried to publish a post, and it didn't work. I keep getting publishing errors due to some sort of javascript problems. I've done some research via blogger's discussion groups, and it seems there are others (though, apparently, not a majority) having this problem. It seems to only affect accounts who have their blogs hosted on their own domain names rather then on blogspot. Although, this is also not affecting everyone who hosts their own domains, as I've seen several friends who have been successfully publishing to their blogs.

I hope it'll be fixed soon.

Rather than wait until it's up and running again, I figured I could at least continue with my blog posts and hope they'll all be published when it's working again.

Hopefully, that won't be too long.

Today is my 5 Year Bloggiversary!

I just realized that today marks 5 years since my very first blog post.

Wow. That's a long time. How'd that happen?

Two years ago, on my 3rd Bloggiversary, I wrote a list of my top 5 favorite blog posts up to that time. I'm re-reading that list now, and think that they still may apply as some of my favorites.

I should probably skim the last couple of years to see if I have any other posts that might make the cut.

Blogging is an interesting thing. I'm still surprised how much I enjoy it, even after all of these years. It's funny, because I rarely have those "Let's see, what should I blog about today..." moments. It's more just what comes to mind at the moment. I suppose that's what makes it so enjoyable to me: it's not work. It's more like writing down a thought. And because it's been documented here on the blog, I now remember more fleeting moments or funny stories that I probably would have otherwise forgotten.

I often joke about my blog saying, "Who knew I had so much to say, without ever really saying anything!"

My cousin, Bruce, was recently called a narcissist just because he keeps a blog. I thought that was awfully harsh criticism. Now granted, he's in public position where he'll have to endure all kinds of criticism left and right, but still.... It did make me think about my own blog, and what it is that I gain from it. What I came to realize is that I'm still blogging for the same reasons that I started it 5 years ago: I blog for myself - it's my own personal online journal, that I don't mind sharing with the world. I never put anything too personal on it, and also make sure that I don't post anything that may get me in trouble. It provides an outlet to vent, a place to document day-to-day happenings that I would otherwise forget, and funny tidbits that simply make me laugh. I feel very fortunate that over the years, I seem to have picked up a following of family, friends, and even people who I've never met who seem to be somewhat interested or amused with what I have to say. What's wrong with that? If keeping an online journal of random thoughts and happenings of my life make me narcissistic, then I guess I'm okay with that.

So, Happy 5th Bloggiversary! Thanks to all of you who have sent comments over the years, and given feedback on my blog. I really love the interaction and sense of community that it has created over time.

Now, let's see if I can keep it up for another 5 years! :)

"Who are YOU?"

said the Caterpillar.



I've been wondering about this for a while now: Who are YOU?.

According to my web hosting company's usage statistics report, my site gets an average of over 5,000 hits per day (sometimes higher). The average amount of daily visits (which I assume means individual users) is 800-1000.

This seems astronomically high to me.
Who are all these people?

Some of these hits are for my regular web site, which has my business portfolio, resume, art projects, etc., There's also still a fair amount of hits for my Raggedy Ann Collection page as well (800/month). But, by and large, the most hits have been for my blog.

I used to assume that the only people reading my blog were friends and family. I mean, who else would read it, right? I've since received numerous comments or emails from people who found me through my blog. These are people I don't know who either found my blog through search engines, or perhaps through other blogs that I am now linked to. I recently had a comment come from a reader in Japan!

I find this most fascinating.

I'd really like to know WHO is reading this?

So, here comes the audience participatory part of this blog post:
If you're reading this, please send me an email, or leave a comment to this post. I'd love to know who you are! Even if you've never left a message before, please do so now. Even if you've never met me, or even if you have, please let me know who you are, where you're from, and (if you'd like) how you came to read my blog.

This should be interesting!
Thanks for playing!

Shout Out to my new friend, Kelly!

Over the years that I've been blogging, I often wondered, "Who's reading this?" I mean, I know certain friends and family read it regularly, but other than that.... who knows? The internet is one big, wide open door.

Yesterday, I received one of my most favorite blog-related emails ever. It made me laugh, and smile the entire day!

It was from a woman named Kelly, who apparently went to school with Dick (she was one grade younger than him).

Anyhow, her email opened with: I have never written an email like this, so bear with me. I went to school with Dick and Kathy Craddock.

This, of course, had my curiosity peaked.

But, it was the next couple of sentences that really got me:

Recently, our high school had a class of the 80's reunion. One of my classmates wrote me an email and said, " check out Dick Craddock's wife's blog; they sound like a fun couple!"

I LOVE that: "Dick Craddock's Wife's Blog". This completely cracked me up!

She told me that she started to read my blog after that endorsement, and found herself continuing to come back because she loved my "tips".

As a blog writer, it makes me very happy to think that someone who doesn't even know me finds my blog interesting and entertaining enough to return to. You just never know! I mean, sure, I find certain things worth mentioning, but I have no idea whether or not anyone else would.

Here's another thing that she wrote that just made me smile and laugh out loud:

So, what does all of this mean? Other than feeling like a weird stalker by returning to your blog........it has had the funniest effect on me. For example my husband and I were walking through an antique show a couple of weekends ago and I saw the oldest raggedy I had ever seen. I kept thinking "oh, I have got to tell Trina!" then I am like," OMG, you don't even know her!" It was funny and weird. I decided you just had to know about me! So finally I decided to write and tell you that I read your blog and I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

I love this. I love that she feels like she knows me, even though she's never met me. (and not in that stalker-kind-of-way!) I believe that I'm actually very careful about what I "put out there" into the world of the internet. I try to be careful not to put in anything too personal. But, I do like to share various musings and tidbits that interest or amuse me, and I know that my personality probably comes across pretty easily in my writing style.

I'm so glad that Kelly decided to email me to let me know that she's one of my blog readers. I love the connection to Dick's past, and the fact that I met a new friend in cyberspace.

The web is an amazing place.

"Hi Kelly!"

Blogging from my phone

Taking a cue from Meg, I've set up my blog account to send posts, and
even photos directly from my iPhone!

Sent from my iPhone

Apologies to the RSS Folks...

A couple of weeks ago, I started to add labels (categories) to my blog posts. I also started to go through my 3-1/2 year archive to label my old posts as well.

It just occurred to me that this may be very confusing to to folks out there using an RSS reader to check for updates on my blog. Suddenly, all of these old posts are showing up as new (because I added the labels, and republished them).

I was wondering why my cousin, Bruce, had left a comment on a post that was nearly two years old. (X-Wing MINI) Now I get it!

Apologies all around.
We hope to have this all straightened out soon.

-Management

Dick is blogging again...

...in case you didn't notice.

Yep, there are a few new posts up there. They're pretty funny.

You should read them in chronological order, though. (don't read from the top down)

One Grumpy Dick.