Six years of blogging

Just a quick note to acknowledge an important milestone for FML: today marks the sixth year that this blog has been in existence. To be fair, it really wasn’t a blog at first in the sense we now take for granted. There weren’t many readily available blogging platforms that I knew about in 2002. I didn’t even know the term. Back then I called it my web diary. This whole personal publishing thingy has seen many changes in that time, with lots of shifts in content and subject focus. But I’m more committed to blogging today than ever before.

I am very happy I’ve chosen to do this. It’s been hard sometimes to write anything, and I haven’t been afraid to simply stop trying to keep up with it for weeks at a time. I’ll never be as prolific and steady a blog author as some. Also, I plan to stick with what works best for me in terms of subject focus, that is, a purposeful mix of family, faith, librarianship, technology, and any other topics that interest me or about which I feel compelled to write. I think that’s the key to my definition of blogging success: to write about things I care about.

I know that I will never achieve the audience that many other librarian colleagues have achieved with their blogs, and honestly, I’m not sure I would want that. I figure that roughly 200-230 people (based mostly on Feedburner logs) find FML interesting. I’m very happy with that!

A sad day for one cougar

In late February I mentioned the fact that an honest-to-goodness mountain lion (a.k.a. cougar) was spotted not far from where we live. In the past few weeks there have been more sightings in the surrounding area. I’m not positive they involve the same animal but it seems quite likely to me.

So it was with quite a bit of shock and sadness that I read this morning about a cougar being shot on the North Side of Chicago by police officers who had cornered it in an alley. Shock, because somehow it is a REALLY BIG DEAL that a beautiful, large wild animal (all of about 150 lbs.) could survive and wander around in such an urban area. Sadness, because it was killed. Of course I know that such an animal can be dangerous and I would not have wanted anyone to be hurt by it. Somehow though that doesn’t lessen the sense of loss I now feel.

It’s interesting to note that the last sighting of a cougar in the wild in the whole state of Illinois was all the way back in 1864, in the southern tip of the state.