I’m usually really bad at remembering anniversaries, so I am probably unduly proud to have managed to recognize this milestone.  This, my friends, is my 5000th post on this blog.  To take a look back, I searched around on The Wayback Machine and found my very first post on August 5, 2003.  Yeah, that’s not the date I’d been celebrating as my anniversary.  Told you I was bad at this sort of thing.

Strangely, I have memories of reading that Jerry Seinfeld book to that class.  It was a blast.

At that time, I was posting via Greymatter, one of the earlier blog platforms. 

I moved to a hosted WordPress blog, hosted and maintained by my library system at the time in 2005.  It looked something like this.  Throughout these early years, my focus was more on news and resources than book reviews though in 2005, I was starting to review books each week:

If you can believe it, they were even shorter than the ones I post now.  Yet I know they took much longer for me to write.  After posting 5000 posts, you get a system and rhythm down!

In 2010, I changed the name of my blog to Waking Brain Cells, since I was moving away from my hosting library system and into a new job and library.  In my new job, I am still welcome to work on my blog, and I donate the books from publishers that I receive to my library.  It’s a small way for me to thank them for the support they offer.

So thank you everyone, for those of you who have been reading for awhile to those who have just joined in.  This blog has been a way for me to connect in so many ways.  It is a way for me to connect to my love of books for children and teens, a way for me to contribute to the public libraries I am so passionate about, a way for me to work on my writing (yes, I cringed to put up those earlier posts), and a way for me to connect with all of you: readers, librarians, teachers, publishers and authors.  This blog has brought me so much more than I ever anticipated when I started it almost a decade ago. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you.