Today, kids, marks the 6th Blogiversary of swirlspice.

Well, not exactly, because it hasn’t been six years at this domain (started out on blogspot). And I did drop in some stuff into the archives that I wrote in the few months before September 26, 2002. But you know what I mean. This is the day. I know it is because I put it on my calendar so I could remember instead of having a vague sense that it was some time in September and then having to go dig through my archives every year and usually figuring it out after the actual date has passed.

So what you have before you is a spiffy new design courtesy of Mel and Sean at Emtwo Web Studios. Mel and I go way back. Before this blog, even! She’s the best.

I have to give major kudos to Mel and Sean. Mel somehow crawled into my brain and took my vague sense of what I wanted this place to look like and came up with something just perfect. And then there’s the matter of my spectacular hard drive failure (chronicled on Twitter) which took my nice neat Movable Type export with it (and I was so proud of myself for getting it successfully exported in the first place). And then there’s the part where I decided to switch hosts while all this was ongoing. They wrestled my babies back from my janky database and deposited into a fresh new WordPress backend. I cannot thank them enough.

My thanks to Missy, too, because this was a wonderful birthday present.

Insert “work in progress” disclaimer here. I’m still mucking around with sidebars and there’s some backend stuff going on and I’m sorting through something like 3800 posts. I’ll point out features as they come up. Y’all all read this by RSS, anyway, right? You get the idea: posts, comments, colors, bubbles, whatnot.

I’m tickled pink by what Mel and Sean have made happen here and I’m excited about a seventh year of blogging.

Thanks, y’all.

With special guest…