About

I started blogging back in 2001, in college, before I knew that there was a specific name that people would give to these occasional updates on my personal site.

It wasn’t until after I graduated that I started an actual blog. All my friends had also graduated and moved back from whence they came, and I felt like updating everyone all at once made more sense than telling the same stories in multiple email threads to different people. This was back in the days before Facebook was the behemoth it is today — right on the brink of when LiveJournal and MySpace and Blogger links would fill everyone’s blogrolls and bookmarks.

Over time, I went from manually coding my blog in HTML (even though I knew Content Management databases were the way to go) to hosting it on LiveJournal to installing Movable Type to now using WordPress. My topics changed, too: when I was younger, and before literally everyone was online, I complained a lot about my job and my weight, and wrote a lot of introspective stuff about life. Over time, as my life changed and my point of view changed, my blog became more of a public, digital version of the handwritten journals I’ve kept since I was in elementary school.

I blog about my son a lot. I flip between sewing, gardening, and photography as my hobbies of choice. I’ve successfully lost (and kept off) about 70 pounds, and I’d like to lose 15-20 more. I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 43. I work in data warehousing and business intelligence, focusing in data dashboard design.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.


3 thoughts on About

  1. Greetings,

    I came across our site while researching information about my family history. My Great Great Grandparents settled in Toledo after immigrating from Germany. They owned a saloon that was, apparently, built by H. Mooers & Co., which led me to your blog.

    The website I listed is my personal blog story as I seek to find a mysterious woman named Emma Bonds listed on my grand father’s birth certificate. But this is not the reason I am writing. I am wondering if I could email you a photo (or you can find it on the blog post I am currently writing) and see if you can identify a building pictured in it. It should be either on South Street or Oliver Street, as those are the two streets my family seems to be most closely associated with, in the Toledo directories. I think the photo was taken 1893 in front of my great grand father’s saloon.

    Thanks for your time and consideration,

    John Ahrens

  2. John – I emailed you a reply, but I just wanted to mention here that I would love to assist! Looking forward to an excuse to visit the 3rd floor of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library downtown. 🙂

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