Me on my third birthday, 1975. Caption contest? I still have one of those Corelle plates in my cupboard! Those things are virtually bombproof – unless you drop one!

Wow. My blog is six years old! I’m not exactly sure why I started this blog. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and even worked professionally as a journalist for about 10 years. For the longest time, I was kind of loathe to really get into the whole “blogging” thing. I mean, it seemed so…selfish. Writing in the first person? Using the words “I?” “Me?” Who the hell cares about what I have to say? Years of working as a journalist kind of trained me – er brainwashed me – into distancing myself in everything I wrote. Just tell the story, leave yourself out of it. Be impartial, write in the third person, etc. Adjusting to writing in the first person – about myself – was something that took YEARS for me to be comfortable doing (except in diaries), and it really only happened in the past couple of years.

I published my first blog on Dec. 24, 2011, and it was basically a “year in review” piece. To view this “maiden” blog, click here.

Then I did a few beer blogs, and a blog about amusement parks. Then this blog just kind of was lying dormant for a while. I wasn’t really sure what to do with it.  I actually kind of forgot about it for a while. In the meantime, I never stopped writing.

I started doing write-ups of pub trivia games in late 2012 on my Facebook site for my trivia team (Miskatonic University Fighting Cephalopods). I started developing a loyal little following that included trivia players, friends, trivia hosts and others. Then, for the first time in February, 2016, someone called me a “trivia blogger.” It was one of the owners of Stony Lake Brewing Company in Saline, MI. I was like, “Huh. OK!” That never even occurred to me before! Then, a few months later, a trivia host called me the same thing, at a MTL semifinals game at the Wurst Bar. “OK,”  I thought – “I guess I am a trivia blogger.”

So what do I do now? Should I do anything? Do I have to live up to this moniker?

I started trying to make the trivia write-ups more than “just the facts” pieces – and use them, at least partially, as vehicles for storytelling, sharing various trivial facts, ranting about various topics, venting about other players on my team, trivia hosts, etc. Though I always made it my policy to not badmouth individual people/teams – no matter how I may have felt about them personally!

But I still struggled with the whole “first person” thing – until I started playing solo trivia games. Writing in the collective “we” didn’t seem to make sense when I was playing trivia games by myself. So you can see in the older trivia “blogs” were written mainly in the collective “we” voice – and most of the “blogs” published after 2016 became a little more… personal.

In late 2016, I started “archiving” all of my old trivia write-ups from the Facebook page and copying them onto this site. Looking back, I’m glad I did this – it makes things so much easier when looking up old question sets. With the “search” feature, I can easily look up old blogs with just a keyword – or I can even look them up by date, or by the place the game was played. I did have a “little” encouragement to do all of this – from someone who used to follow my FB trivia team page and regularly read the game recaps. I have no idea if this person reads any of these blogs or not, but it’s become apparent that I’m slowly – but surely –  developing a little following of this blog (I have 24 followers).

I even started writing some “personal” blogs, travel blogs, and some “topical” blogs about various trivia topics – particularly topics that have given my team trouble in the past such as state borders, national parks, Nicholas Sparks, Disney films, Disney princesses, etc. It’s been kind of an experiment of sorts! I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing with this blog – but I’m definitely enjoying it!