Twenty years ago today I wrote the first post in this space.

Apparently the effort it took to do this was so Herculean that I didn’t get around to writing another post until two months later, a post wherein I linked to a description of how I maintained the “constantly updated collection of news and links” that we now call a blog, but didn’t yet really, at least in any popular sense.

I was 33 years old when I started writing here. I’d been with Catherine for 8 years, but Oliver was still seven months from conception, sixteen months from being born.

When the blog turned ten, in 2009, I marked the occasion with a statistical breakdown: 996,016 words written, in 5,388 posts.

Now, 20 years in, it’s 2,670,757 words in 8,970 posts

But a statistical breakdown doesn’t really say much about the last 20 years; so here’s a single post from each of those years as a kind of proxy:

• 1999: Linux Sheep to Shawl
• 2000: Oliver Duncan Lowell Rukavina
• 2001: Twenty-four Hours in West Prince
• 2002: Learning about the body
• 2003: Lessons I’ve Learned from my Gallbladder
• 2004: In Praise of My Dad
• 2005: L’imagerie de la vie en Aniane
• 2006: Farewell Copenhagen
• 2007: The King of Prince Street
• 2008: My Friend the Poet Biologist
• 2009: Getting an Eight Year Old to Sleep
• 2010: Adana Eight Five
• 2011: The Letterpress Came to Town
• 2012: “Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road” Redux
• 2013: Omotesando Koffee
• 2014: Making Dog Poop Bag Dispensers That Matter
• 2015: A Day in the Life of an International Traveling Service Dog
• 2016: Four Minutes of Perfect Television
• 2017: How to talk to people about cancer
• 2018: Autism Coordination Act

That collection is more akin to a series of flashes of landscapes from a moving train than a comprehensive review. But if you want to get a hint of a taste of my last two decades, it’s a good place to start.

By lucky happenstance, this anniversary comes on the day that we’ve rendezvoused with Luisa and Olle here in Halifax. They have been such dear friends over such a large swath of these 20 years. Catherine and Oliver and Olle and Luisa and I went out for an excellent Japanese meal tonight and we continued the conversations we started many years ago. And started new ones. Kind of like this blog. It was an excellent way to mark the date.