Swan song

Another post that is gong to start with “I can’t believe how long it’s been since my last post”.   And if you’ve been reading blogs for a while, you know that blogs that start posting further and further apart are heading in a direction that generally isn’t positive.  I’ve been reading blogs for a while now, and sometimes you just know when people stop posting regularly that it means they will be stopping altogether.   Sometimes they tell you, and sometimes they just fade away.

I’ve been thinking about the blog lately – not posting, but just thinking about it.  My first post was on March 11, 2006, and I’ve had 497 posts, and, so far, 6,860 comments.  I was more active on posting for the first three years, but this year I’ve been dwindling a bit.  I’ve met so many amazing people through my blog – and when I started thinking about stopping, I kept on thinking about all the people that I’ve come in contact through it, and how I get so inspired from reading their blogs or comments.  And so I’d post one more post, and keep this going for a little bit more.

But now, about 3.5 years after I started, I think it’s time to say good-bye.  Life is different now than when I started this, and I seem to have lost the voice and urge that I had to blog.  I also haven’t been knitting as much, and I have lost the obsessed crazy need to knit and buy yarn and all that.  I still knit – but its become a quiet, stay at home, personal kind of thing.  I can’t explain it – I still love it – but the obsession is gone.    I definitely have lost the obsession to hoard yarn, and have been destashing a bit – I’d like to get it down to a reasonable level – and actually use it!  As I go through it, I’m just struck with how much nice yarn I have that I totally forgot I had.  We are converting Cieara’s room to a guest room and I’m going to put in a bookcase with cubbies to store my yarn so I can actually see it – and I’m looking forward to using it!  But less knitting, less yarn-ing, less obsession makes for a pretty boring blog – and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

It is hard, in a lot of ways, to let go of blogging.  I’ve been doing this for so long, and it’s recorded some major events in not only my knitting life, but my family life.  As I have been looking through the posts over the last few years, I realized that this has become a family snapshot of a very transitional period – kids graduating, moving out, hitting milestones.    I don’t want to lose all that and I’m looking into archiving it into a book (using Blurb or something like that).  But it is hard to think that this journaling of our lives will stop – so who knows  – maybe I’ll be back at another time, on another blog!  I also look at the statistics for my blog – 497 posts – 3 more and I’d hit 500 – maybe I should keep it going!  But then I’d start looking at the other statistics – maybe I should stay until 7000 comments, or 550 posts – and then I realize – it doesn’t matter.  Blogging to me was never about numbers – it was about putting myself out there and seeing if anyone would get it.  And I’ve done that, but I can’t do it any longer.

So I wanted to post to say good-bye, and thank all of your for reading my blog over the years.  I really have enjoyed getting to know you through your comments, links, and blog posts.  You’ve always been so nice and supportive – and such bad enablers!  I wish you all the best in your knitting (and non knitting!) lives…

You can always find me on Ravelry as JeanneL or on Facebook as Jeanne Landes – and I’ll probably still read the blogs I ready because I do like seeing what people do…but for now….

Adieu, adios, bye-bye, cheerio, ciao,  so long, toodle-oo…good bye!