Happy Birthday Kenthinksaloud!

Today I came on to WordPress to find a nice little surprise. The good folks at wordpress.com told me today is the second birthday of this little blog.

Aww… 🙂

And my, how it – and I – have changed.

This won’t be a long trawl through memory lane – after all the blog is only two and not twenty! But I do want to say a few things in honour of the occasion.

First I want to thank the several hundred followers – some bloggers, some private individuals – who read this blog faithfully time and again, leaving comments, pressing the ‘like’ button and sharing on their own blogs or sending links to Facebook and Twitter.

When I started this blog I knew it would be something of a speciality subject. How many people out there would really want to read about some British guy who had dragged his family halfway around the world to live in Bangladesh?! I had one hundred followers and one thousands hits per month as my main goals  – plus great excitement at the possibility I might have readers in one hundred countries one day. Kenthinksaloud quickly surpassed all three goals (several times over in the case of followers) and, these days, I don’t even keep close tabs on the traffic (oh okay, perhaps one eye on the statistics). All I know is: lots of you read this blog and lots of you return again and again from over all over the place. It is all very humbling.

Secondly, I want to thank the extra-special readers who didn’t know me when I started all this two years ago but who have since become good friends. Quite a few have become very close friends and your love and support is greatly valued. Some have just been around so long I feel like I’ve known you all our lives! Though with the weird world of blogging being what it is, one or two are bloggers I know well but still don’t know their real names (are you listening Apple?! 😛 )!

Lastly, I want to thank my long-suffering family – Wifey, Thing I (AKA Amory Powell, as a blogger in her own write right, these days) and Thing II – who have supported me, albeit often with raised eyebrows and even the occasional “I’m not sharing that on Facebook!” Little did we know just how much time this blog would occupy (annoyingly) nor how it would lead, one way or another, to getting a novel written and accepted for publication (nicely). Now I just await the notice of an agent…

And I guess there is just one other thing I have to say about the last two years on board WordPress. How come, after nearly two hundred posts and faithful blogging throughout all this time, the good boys and girls at WordPress STILL continue to ignore me and have never ‘freshly pressed’ me. I wouldn’t say it is a goal for the future or anything – any more than you can say winning the national lottery is one.

But it would be nice. 🙂

My birthday mug shot – not my best picture or joke but there you go…