Thomil's Random Ramblings - Ten Years On!

Well I’ll be damned! While I was busy pouring out righteous scorn over Cork City Council, the NTA and pretty much every other public body in existence here in Ireland, I completely missed that this blog, Thomils Random Ramblings, celebrated its tenth anniversary back on November 4th. On that day, ten years ago, I published the first post on this blog, which was originally only meant to keep a number of Canadian friends of my family up to date on our antics over here. Little did I know that only half a year after I’d started it, the focus of this blog would shift dramatically.  

From little more than a side project, Thomils Random Ramblings has turned into my main outlet for observations about the world around me, product reviews, at least when I have the money for said products and travel reports, you know, when the world isn’t in the grip of a pandemic and a wave of mind-numbing stupidity. Its fortunes have waxed and waned over those ten years. Some blog posts smashed through the thousand-hit mark like it was nothing, while most of my more recent posts have struggled to crash through the fifty-hit mark. Any plans to monetize the blog went out the window a long time ago, so this is, and will remain, a hobby of mine, albeit a major one. 

To be honest, I’m still astonished myself sometimes that I’ve kept it up for as long as I have, especially given the massive changes I’ve experienced over the lifetime of this blog. From emigrating to Ireland back in 2012, through ups and downs with my parents’ health and significant burnouts at work, through two job changes, the passing of my parents and finally the most severe pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, there have been enough changes to justify shelving this project, either temporarily or permanently, yet I’m still here. The fact that you’re reading this should be plenty of evidence for that. And to be honest, after going through that, I doubt that there’ll be much to stop me from keeping this up for at least the next ten years as well. Following my most recent job change back in 2019, I’m now well into what is playing out to be the most challenging but also most rewarding period of my professional life. Several big things are developing in that sphere and at least a few of those will be generic enough that I’ll be able to write about them here on my blog without violating any NDA. I’m also still mulling the idea of a dedicated blog only for my work experiences, both in order to keep a clear difference between that and my private interests and because I’m looking for an excuse to launch another blog over on Wordpress. I’ll have to see how that goes.

For now, as we approach the end of the second WTF year in a row, it’s time for me to relax and unwind, to look back at where I’ve come from and to enjoy the little pleasure that running a blog for ten years is. Since this is a purely private blog, I don’t have any anniversary giveaways, raffles or discount codes to give away, but I hope you’ll enjoy this post anyway, as a break from all the politics and criticism of the last couple of months.

Here's to the next ten years!