Today marks the three year anniversary for Pick Me! Three years ago, I walked into Mike’s office and said, “I want a blog.” He suggested that I turn to companies that specialize in blogging like, say, Blogger, but I insisted that I wanted my OWN blog on our own server, so he set me up with some homebrew software that he had been using on figby.com for years and I was off and running.

Within a year, we were converting the homebrew software to WordPress. Not only did my weblog get a change, but figby.com was also converted. We’ve been working with them ever since. I love the plugins that make my life easier and I’m grateful to Mike for keeping things running smoothly in the background so that all I need to do is let the words flow out of my fingers.

This weblog (and the others I write for) wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for my minister, Sean Parker Dennison. He did a sermon in late August called, “What I did over the summer.” What he did was read weblogs. I had never heard of a weblog before then. Suddenly, the world opened up to me.

When I started Pick Me!, I thought it would be a portal to the publishing world. It is, but not in the way that I thought. I thought that I would be able to use my blog to get freelance work with magazines like Seventeen or Self. Instead, I have an audience that reaches further than both of those magazines put together. Every time I get another comment on “When Your Best Friend Ditches You For Her Boyfriend”, I realize that I am reaching more people with my own blog than I ever aspired to by hoping for freelance work.

Most importantly, thank you for reading my weblog every day. I look at the stats and I see you reading. You come by every day to see what I’m serving up and I appreciate it. I see you using RSS aggregators to read my site and I appreciate that too. No matter how you’re getting my words, I’m glad you’re reading them every day. I imagine you out there, just like me when I read other people’s blogs. I know you laugh with me and worry about me. I can feel you on the other end of the line and all I can say is “Thank You” in return.

Thank you…