I have been blogging with WordPress.com for 13 years! Many of my colleagues have been blogging on WP.com for quite a bit longer, and WordPress the open source project celebrates its 20th birthday this year.

I’ve been too busy working and moving and taking classes to blog much so far this year. I blogged more in every year except 2011, when I only blogged 9 times. I still have half a year to go, so I’m not too worried. I have some things coming up that I will blog about once I have some space and time to process them, as well as some books I’ve read that I’m contemplating and want to connect to through writing.

In the meantime, the number 13 is a good one. It’s the sixth prime, which seems pretty high, but it’s true – 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 are all primes. One isn’t a prime, which I think is shady. Thirteen is a twin prime to 11, and a cousin prime to 17. It’s part of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…). It’s the size of a baker’s dozen. Most hotels and tall buildings in the western world don’t have a floor 13. If you’re afraid of the number 13, you suffer from triskaidekaphobia. In an Agatha Christie novel, there was a superstition that the first person to get up from a table of 13 guests would be the first to die (they did not, in the novel, but someone did). COPPA requires children to be at least 13 to create social media accounts in the United States. The United States, in fact, was based on the premise of 13 colonies, and so the current flag has 13 stripes (6 white stripes, 7 red stripes, and a hell of a lot of stars). In 13 years I’ve mad nearly 2,400 posts on this blog, which is like making one every two days or so. I’ve written more than 315,000 words – and I bet many of them are the exact same words just in a different order. I am sure that today is the first – and possibly the only ever – time I’ve written “triskaidekaphobia” though now I’ve written it twice. I’ve been married for 13 years (our 14th anniversary is in about another 6 weeks)! Different cultures call the number lucky or unlucky, though so far it’s proven to be very lucky for me personally (possibly because I do not suffer from triskaidekaphobia) (that’s three times).