Ten Years of Happenings at the Harrisons

On August 15, 2008, this blog was born! In the ten years since that first post, there have been over 1500 posts ..... and 484 Flashback Fridays! When I look back at the very first post I wrote (here's the link in case you'd like to check it out) I realize that what this blog is today is still what it was in the beginning: a way to communicate with far-flung family and friends.

So on this 10th anniversary of Happenings at the Harrisons, I have some random thoughts about this project that I started ten years ago today. If you're interested in reading, bear with me because this post is a doozie. If not, no one will know you skipped it and I'll see you in two more days for an epic Flashback Friday!

A lot has changed since that first post on August 15, 2008, but ..... a lot is the same. When I started this blog, Peter was a sophomore in college and John was about to start his freshman year at Tufts. We were living in Wisconsin, and since the boys were going to college on the East Coast, they were newly far from home and I wanted them to be able to see what we were doing. Also, our parents didn't live near us and part of my thinking was that the blog would be another way to stay in touch with them (as well as extended family). Today, we live in California and all of the kids live far from home. Even though our exact locations have changed, the blog's usefulness as a way to keep everybody in touch continues.

Of course, in the last ten years social media has exploded and I sometimes wonder if this blog isn't redundant because of Instagram, Facebook, and even Snapchat. It's not unusual for me to get scooped by others on social media, but what's more likely is that I scoop myself with the pictures I post on social media. So what lots of people see on the blog is no longer the surprise it used to be. Because we share things so quickly on social media the blog sometimes feels like old news. There are days I wonder if this blog is really needed. But then someone will tell me how they enjoyed a particular post and it gets me recharged.

What I like about the blog compared to social media are two things. First, the blog is a semi-private space. What I mean by this is that although anybody anywhere can access my blog, I don't have it set up so that a random internet searcher can find it in a search. You need to know the blog's address to get to it. What that means is that the people who come to the blog are those who know how to find it. In other words, the audience is people who know me or someone in our family. Which is what I want because I do give some details about our family and friends and our activities, and I'd rather not share that with the whole wide world. Second, the blog lets me narrate the pictures more than I'd want to do on social media. Believe it or not I try not to be overly wordy, but I realize I'm not always successful (Exhibit A: this post!). The blog has become a picture journal with a few words interspersed to explain the pictures.

The best thing I've ever done on the blog is ..... Flashback Friday. I thought of it a few months after the blog started. I think we all love seeing the old pictures. I like that the definition of what is old evolves, because some of the pictures from the blog's early days now qualify for Flashback Fridays. I love searching through our photo albums every week for a Flashback Friday picture. I think the fan favorites are the pictures from when the kids were little, but I like them all, at all ages and stages. Of course, the kids hate it when I post pictures from their middle school years. We were all that age once, and none of us like those pictures of ourselves, but lucky for most of us our parents don't have a blog with a weekly Flashback Friday. Except I do. (Is it evil of me to say that?)

From time to time I've had to explain to curious people why the blog's URL is dontknowmuchelse.blogspot.com. Obviously, it would be a lot easier if it was happeningsattheharrisons.blogspot.com. But when I created the blog, happeningsattheharrisons.blogspot.com was taken by somebody else. (The nerve!) I tried to pick a title for the blog that would be the same as the URL, but once I thought of Happenings at the Harrisons I knew that had to be the blog's name. So for the URL I picked a phrase that Brad's mom sometimes says when she's wrapping up a phone conversation ("well, I don't know much else ....."), and made it into the address of my blog. My logic was that it would be easy to remember. Years later, the URL for happeningsattheharrisons.blogspot.com became available and I snatched it up and linked it to my blog. I didn't want to confuse the people who already knew the blog's URL as dontknowmuchelse.blogspot.com, so I just linked the happeningsattheharrisons.blogspot.com URL to my blog so that if somebody typed it in they'd find the blog. But then at some point, for a reason I don't understand, Blogspot dropped me from that address. Right now, happeningsattheharrisons.blogspot.com is available again. But at the moment I don't care enough to go to the trouble of connecting it to my blog, because everybody knows the blog as dontknowmuchelse.blogspot.com.

You might search the archives of the blog and occasionally find that a photo is missing from a post. This frustrates me to no end. All the pictures on the blog are supposed to be safely saved on Picasa and I'm not sure why it happens that some disappear from the blog's archives. One of these days I plan to go in and fix the problem by re-inserting the missing pictures.

My sister Kathy is pretty much the only person who has posted comments on the blog over the years. My parents used to send me comments via email (because they get their blog posts via email). Other people will occasionally send me an email or tell me in person general comments about the blog. But other than that it's not been an interactive blog. Which I'm okay with.

I used to change the look of the blog using the templates that are built into Blogger. Then one day I decided to get fancy and I started teaching myself how to change the code inside the blog. It's not that hard and I did this for awhile and was able to customize the look of the blog. Then I got tired of always changing the look of the blog and I let it be the same for a very long time. But when I got tired of the look of the blog and wanted to change it, and realized I had totally forgotten what code I had changed such a long time ago, and then I couldn't undo what I had done! So now I can't change anything! This means the blog as you see it now is kind of stuck in time. I'm waiting for a knight in shining computer science armor to come and save me. Either that or I need to do a lot of work to figure out how to fix the pickle I got myself into. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the blog the way it looks right now because I think it's going to look that way for the foreseeable future!

If you're reading this post, I owe you a big thanks. I get a lot of joy from writing this blog. It lets me be a tiny bit creative and more importantly it's a connection to the people I love most in the world. But if nobody read it I wouldn't be writing it. So to everybody out there who reads, or who has read, Happenings at the Harrisons, I'm truly grateful for your enthusiasm and for your being a part of an experiment that ten years later is still going strong.

The Harrison family is forever changing. The family that Brad and I created, starting on the day we got married, will forever be the best thing I've ever done in my life. This blog lets me write an ongoing love letter to that family. To be able to do this, I am so grateful.

Love, Sue