This may win for most epic picture of the year. Altho, it’s still January and that picture is butt-ass old, so far, he is NUMBER ONE in my life.

Also number one, these posts (a lie):

I wrote about my new obsession. And it would be RAD if you could comment on it.

I also wrote about Amelia. I’m wicked proud of it.

We’re doing a birth defects/birth injury/birth trauma carnival on Sunday on Band Back Together if’n you want to join us!

So go read, then come back and tell Your Aunt Becky what YOU’VE been writing about this week. Let’s do a link-up, y’all.

“You should start a blog,” The Daver, circa 2003

“What the fuck is a ‘blog’?” Student Nurse Becky, circa 2003.

I had plans – grand plans – after graduation. Most times, they involved things like “never wiping old person ass again,” or “taking a nap,” or “eating thousands of cheeseburgers,” and “taking over the universe.” Upon occasion (generally when I was sleepy and/or drunk) I wondered what I would DO with the rest of my life. I simply couldn’t visualize it.

But it was that one statement, made by a much younger Daver that started me down a path I’d never expected. I became a blogger.

It was through my first blog, Mushroom Printing, I learned that I could write – albeit not very well. Like anything, it took years of practice and several good editors before I really learned what made a blog post good. And I might argue that I’ve never learned that trick.

It wasn’t until I started writing Mommy Wants Vodka in 2007, shortly after I turned 27, that I realized how powerful a voice could be. It was then that I began pouring myself out onto a blank WordPress screen. What came out was sometimes good, more often not, it was bad, but it was mine. Those words were mine.

Out of a twisted branch of a conversation I’d had many years before, I found my voice.

I’m not about to sit here and tell you how GREAT my voice is or that I’m SO RAD to be a blogger because some company gave me a yacht*, but I am going to tell you that through that voice, I found myself.

There’s no dollar amount, no traffic spike, no amount of comments that can ever compare to how powerful that is.

I went black yesterday to protest SOPA/PIPA (which I keep thinking of as “SOAP” and “Pippy Longstocking”) not because I am certain that these bills will be shutting me down – I don’t know that – but because I love my Internet. The verbage on these to bills is vague enough that something – anything – can happen.

Certainly, as someone who’s shit’s been stolen, I dislike piracy. I’d like to be able to take those who have stolen my material, passed it off as their own, and shove them in a hole and make them listen to the Facts of Life theme for days.

Let me be clear: stealing shit? That sucks. Buy your own fucking movies – I do. Come up with your own blog name – I did. Write your own damn words – I do.

That aside, those laws freak me out.

And I owe the Internet a debt of gratitude I can never repay. For helping a lost girl find her way. That is worth more than any yacht**.

I mean, where would I be without my crazy dancing cat videos?

*Bwahahahahahaahhahahaha!

**BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!