Eight! I'm Eight!!

And I scarcely feel a day over seven!

But it's true, this little blog thing started eight years ago today! And it's still here, and I still like, and people still read it and so, yeah, I'm eight!

I started small and ... well, here's that first post:

Newbie

I'm new to this blog thing, but I do love to talk and I do have an opinion—hell, I have thousands of opinions—so I guess that's as good a place to start. 

Let's talk about.........Me!

I am a happily-partnered gay male, and I have been with the love of my life for the last eight years. We met online in an AOL chatroom—no, not THAT kind of chatroom—and became IM friends, and then email friends, and then phone friends and then friends across the country and then I went from California to Miami to meet him, and that was that.

A few months later I'd left California and settled in Miami—talk about culture shock! We stayed in Miami for about six years until Carlos—the aforementioned partner—accepted a job in Smallville, South Carolina, and we loaded up the truck and moved to....well, not Beverly Hills, but Smallville. A small town. A cute town. A town full of nice people who didn't seem at all peeved that the newest arrivals were a couple of mo's from Miami.

That's a start, I think. More to come.....I hope.

My how things have changed since then ... so let's take a moment and look at some facts about ISBL:

This is post 7,540 ... sheesh I talk a lot; that's almost two-and-one-half posts a day though i wonder what I said on half a post???

There are three hundred followers, though thankfully not all of them comment because that would be insane to keep up with.

From May 2010 ... cuz that's when I started counting ... until this morning, I have been visited by 2,858,754 people.

The most popular post on this blog is, strangely, Steve Kornacki Comes Out which has been viewed almost 11,000 times; seriously. It has 3,000 more hits than the second most popular post, Happy Birthday Joan Van Ark.

Seriously; that's my Top Two!

My audience ... now that’s funny ... is mostly from the US, followed by Germany, Russia—does Putin know a lot of Russians are reading a gay man’s blog?—Canada, the UK, and the Ukraine, Australia, Poland and The Netherlands. Quite the mixed bag, I think.

But I thank all of them, all of you, for coming by to check on what I have to say whether it's political, social, architectural, fashionable, or just some stories about me and Carlos and our furry family.

Thanks.