I had my two year blog anniversary a couple of days ago. Yippee and all that jazz. Two years of blogging – it’s been, for the most part, an enjoyable learning curve. Of all the things I find I need to do on social media, I must say the blog is my favourite.

The first year of blogging on WordPress, I opted to pay extra for my own domain name. I didn’t regret that choice. This year, I’ve decided to go with the upgrade that means no advertising placed on my blog by anyone but me, more storage space, the option to do a bit of custom design and the use videos or audio files. You never know when I might decide to go multi-media.

To date, I’ve posted 271 times (this post will be 272). My blog has had over 31,000 views and almost 3000 comments. I currently have 2244 followers (if WordPress will ever get around to updating my Facebook and Twitter numbers and adding them in). Not bad for two years of effort. Small potatoes to some, I’m sure, but I’m thrilled.

Naturally, I wanted to celebrate my anniversary – if only because the WordPress people were so kind as to remind me of the date with a nifty little gold cup icon on my stats page. But I couldn’t. I was in the midst of serious laptop problems which puts me into high-anxiety mode. I call anything serious that I can’t rectify myself. I had to send my laptop into town to a computer whiz kid and have him back-up all my files and do a complete reformat. If I’d known that was needed, I could have probably handled it on my own but ever the optimist, I hoped it would be something a bit simpler. No such luck.

I had two days to mope around the house reflecting on my total lack of flexibility and complete dependence on an electronic gadget. We have other laptops in the house and I defaulted to my old Dell (practically pulling it out of Bruce’s hands – that’s how things work around here. When I get a new laptop, he inherits the old one). But of course the Dell doesn’t look or act anything like my newer model HP and it bugged the hell out of me. As you can imagine, Bruce’s suggestion that at least I had another computer to use (and could be grateful for that) fell on deaf ears.

But seriously, I haven’t been out of sight or touch of my laptop for almost two years – I’ve spent more time looking at the screen than I have doing anything else (and believe me, that statement just gave me pause for serious thought). I described this to Bruce as analogous to him going out to his truck one morning and finding that every single tool he owned was gone. How would he work? How would he feel? Like it or not, this bit of electronic gadgetry represents all my tools rolled into one package. I can’t do my job (writing) without it.

All the angst is behind me now. My laptop came back – emptied, fresh and new, except the one backup folder on the desktop. I didn’t lose anything. It was time consuming to reinstall Office and a few of my other go-to programs. It took most of last night for Windows to get itself totally updated and I had to do my own manual update to reinstall Window Live Writer 2012. I can’t blog without that tool! iTunes reinstalled with all my playlists intact. Everything is back to the way it was before the problems.

Except this low-level anxiety – what if it happens again? I resolve to check out a more systematic way of backing up my work. But knowing myself, I probably will put that off (my human nature being what it is).

I will end by saying: Happy two year blogging anniversary to me – albeit a couple of days late. I send out so many thanks to all the wonderful people who follow my blog, read my posts, like and put up the great comments that keep me motivated. I am also grateful for the many bloggers I have discovered and follow – I’ve learned so much from so many of you.