This is it.

This dark, grainy pic is actually me with the 2 of the 2012, taken right before the new year at the Times Square Museum. If you squint, you can just make out that I'm in there....

It's my 200th post!

I feel like that could be kind of a big deal, as blogging goes.

A note on the title. I am not fabulous. Not by any means. As you can see from my posts, I am actually very boring. And a little obsessed with my cats, which I am sure you have noted. I am not quite sure why I picked it at the time. Back when I started the blog in July 2008, I was a 25 year old. I had moved to St. Louis the summer before, and was finally starting to feel more like an adult and less like a student. Not that my bank account would show it (then, or now). My initial focus was trying to be a more budget-savvy twenty-something. Not necessarily to give others budget advice, because I am certainly not an expert, but to share the choices I was making that were hopefully smart financial ones. As I am quickly approaching 30, that is still a focus for me, however this also become a place for personal reflection, plus posts about recipes, crafts, and books I am reading. Oh, and of course a place to chronicle my pre-30 bucket list.

This was actually not my first blog. I started my first blog in spring 2005, when they were relatively new. Does that make me a hipster? My introduction to blogging was actually during my last semester as an undergraduate student at UW-Madison. I was taking an Internet and New Technology course in the School of Journalism. The class focused on new and developing media, and one of our assignments was to develop a blog, and keep it throughout the course of the semester. At the end of the semester, we exchanged blogs with someone else in the class, and had to draw conclusions about them from the blog persona that they put forward. I do not even remember the name of that blog, because I am fairly certain I deleted it when the class was over, and switched to a different personal blog. Blogger was still relatively new at the time. As a part of joining, we actually received a Gmail account, which was brand new, and still had access by invitation only, offering the greatest storage of any e-mail service. I wrote my final paper for the class on Google, and it's corporate strategies that were leading towards greater innovations and fast expansion. Was I right? One of the key ones was to allow staff to spend 70% of their time on their assigned tasks, and 30% of their time creating, allowing everyone to be innovators. A lot of their current products have come out of the Google labs and these strategies. And, of course, Google is now a verb. I ramble...

In honor of my 200th post, I thought it was time to set some blog goals for the next 200 posts.

1. Post an average of 2-3 times/week. I have done much better at posting regularly, but I have a bad habit of falling off for weeks, or even months. 
2. Connect with more readers. Are you reading my blog? Become a follower! I would love to know who is reading. Or feel free to post a comment or two. I love comments. : )
3. Improve the quality of the pictures in my posts. This may mean that I need to use my actual camera rather than iPhone.
4. Take an Alt Summit class (or two). 
5. Figure out what to do with the name when I turn 30 in 10 months. I'm thinking a change may be in order.
6. Read more blogs. I think you become a better writer by reading more. 
7. Run a blog contest. Who doesn't love free stuff?
8. Finish my 30B430 list!  

On to post 201!