Retrospective

Do you know what today is? No, I thought not. Well, you only have yourself to blame if you don't pay attention.

If you had, you would know that today is the very special and exciting one year blogiversary of Fumbling Towards Geekdom!

Rather than get all sentimental and write screeds of heartfelt appreciation about what awesome readers I have and how much I love the feeling of community there is here (when everyone hasn't all buggered off on holiday for the whole of January), I'm going to keep the focus where it truly belongs: on me. (Why else have a blog?)

Below the peek-a-boo thingy, which I use to show how much I care about the Important Principles of Good Blog Design such as an uncluttered and maximally informative first page (see!), I am going to do one of those year-in-summary wotsits that I bravely resisted when they were going around like the flu in late December.* Rather than relying on the first sentence of each month to be at all interesting**, I am going to repost my favourite picture (which will probably be a parrot of some variety) and the first sentence or two of whichever non-photo, non-carnival post got the most comments that month.

January

Sunday afternoon café experimentation
After reading the discussion on productive writing strategies over at Bitch PhD a while ago, I decided to try out an approach that lots of people have suggested: the lurk-in-a-café-until-I-get-something-done strategy... [read the rest]

February

Changed my mind. I don't want to stay here after all
See this? See it? That is why you don't want to live in Australia if you have a heart condition. It's five minutes after I found him and my pulse is still racing like I just did a set of 80 kg squats... [read the rest]

March

How to confuse an Australian
There's (at least) one thing that Australians do that still catches me out every time... [read the rest]

April

I couldn't decide between these two photos for April, so I'm going to post them both.



Yeah, one of those
You know that moment when you suddenly realise something that you instantly know should have been obvious all along, but wasn't, and then you are hit with 20-something years' worth of cringing for every time you must have said something that let on that you didn't already know this thing and everyone else around you must have been thinking how naive you were? [read the rest]

May

Leaving, on a jet plane
The final exam for the course I tutor has been cancelled. This is because the draft exam timetable came out yesterday and our exam got scheduled for the final day of the exam period. And oops, ScaryLecturer has already bought tickets to Puerto Rico... [read the rest]

June

Waffle waffle
So we wanted to have waffles, see. And that required ice cream, see. And for perfectly good reasons that would disturb the flow of my story here, we couldn't cycle, but had to take the car to the shops... [read the rest]

July

See StyleyGeek be a bitch!
Here is a paraphrase of the emails I have been exchanging with a woman I met at the hostel in Brisbane... [read the rest]

August

The generational divide, or why my family thinks I am insane
My mother has threatened promised to call tonight. So I was making a mental list of what I can tell her about when she asks how I spent the weekend. The problem is that I don't think she will be able to identify, let alone identify with, any of the things I could mention... [read the rest]

September

Independent Property Group regularly makes me cry
You may remember this, this and this. Whatever the complete opposite of 'in love' is, I am in it with the real estate company that manages our property on behalf of the landlord... [read the rest]

October

InaDWriMo
Much as I'd love to write a novel, I had to decide that this year NaNoWriMo is probably not for me.... [read the rest]

November

There were two pictures I couldn't choose between for November, too.



Dirty little secret
Sometimes my office mate doesn't come in for days or weeks on end, and always leaves a half-full cup of tea sitting on her desk... [read the rest]

December

I need some new role-models
Hearing everyone's voices on these Snapvine players that people have been putting on their blogs has given me a complex... [read the rest]

_________

* Sadly for you, it appears I don't care half as much about the Important Principles of Good Sentence Design.

** It's probably usually something like, "Hullo, it looks like it might be February now" or "My god, can you believe it is March already?"