I’ve been blogging off and on (mostly on) since 2005. No, it hasn’t all been here on The Confusing Middle or hosted by the good people at the WordPress. My first decade in the world of blogging involved a blog titled Carp Dime and was hosted over at Blogger.

I’m pretty sure Carp Dime is still there. I’m just not paying for it anymore. So don’t ask me for the address. I’m sure it’s something generic these days. You can probably find it with a good Google search. But don’t hold me to that, either.

Anyway, I made the move to WordPress in 2015, meaning I’ve only been blogging here going on five years.

I’ll say this, I’ve enjoyed a much more active blogging community through WordPress than I ever did at Blogger. But let’s not slam Blogger completely. I made a number of friends through blogging in that first decade of writing.

Two of the bloggers I knew in those days were actually people I knew in the real world. That’s really where my blogging circle began. Through those blogs, I was introduced to others. In those days, I felt like I’d grown close to some people I’d never met, reading about their lives, watching as they got married, had kids, dealt with and overcame various struggles. Some of those folks, I still follow through social media, even if they don’t necessarily blog anymore.

It’s funny that I bring all this up. Authoress51 just wrote about the Blogging Family the other day over at her blog, Final Chapter.

WordPress seems to have made it a lot easier to connect with other bloggers. I won’t name the names of all the people I’ve grown to consider true friends over the years because I know I’d wind up leaving more than a few out. But they’re the kind of people that I love to hear from and I actually get concerned when I don’t see a new post from them in a long time.

This is where additional connections through social media come in handy. Because even if they’ve hit a writer’s block where blogging is concerned and haven’t made a post in a few months, you can still see that they’re alive and well because you can see their latest vacation pics on the Instagram.

In all these years of blogging, I’ve connected with several other bloggers through Twitter, Facebook, email, and even over the phone. But until now, I’ve never met a fellow blogger in person. Well, except for those few I mentioned earlier that I knew in real life before I knew they blogged. They don’t count.

Last week, I posted a virtual tour of my new apartment. In it, I offered to give away a ton of records that I had sitting in the living room to anyone who wanted to come and claim them. Well, Bex, whom you may know from her blog, BEXoxoBlog, commented and said she’d be happy to come and take them off my hands.

Not long after Bex and I started following each other’s blogs, we figured out that we lived near each other. But in the years since we started reading one another’s adventures, we never met. Now, here we are, I’ve got all this vinyl I’m dying to get rid of and she has big plans for those records.

She and her husband, whom you’ll know as Fella, dropped by this past Thursday evening to grab those two big plastic tubs full of records. We all spent time in my living room, just hanging out and passing time like new/old friends will do. Sadly, I had to turn down their invitation to join them for dinner. Well, I didn’t have to turn them down, but the hacking cough I was still dealing with kept me from wanting to be a disturbance in public.

However, now that we’ve met, I do hope we have more excuses to hang out in the future. Honestly, I’d love the opportunity to meet so many other friends I’ve known through blogging over the years. The reality is that most of us live hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart. Some of us aren’t even in the same country.

Guys, I have a valid passport. Just sayin’.

Pics or it didn’t happen, right?