One year and 2 days ago I gave my wife the best birthday gift I could have ever given her.  Because of the awesomeness of this gift we had to count it as her birthday and Christmas gifts all wrapped into one.  Even if that is the case and she had it to do all over again, I am sure she would do it in a heartbeat.

367 days ago my wife got the one thing she has wanted the most.  A little baby girl.  We didn’t know all that yet or any of the details at all, but needless to say, we had a pretty good birthday.  Fastforward to today.  My wonderful, amazing, sexy, awesome, and every other positive feminine descriptive word you can think of wife turns __ years old today.  (See that?  I didn’t even get myself in trouble for asking or telling a woman’s age!…That is a bad thing right?  Well, if not you can ask her yourself.)

KK, the last 3 or so years of my life with you have been the absolutely best.  I cannot begin to describe (except by beginning with that) how much I love, respect and cherish you!  (Can guys use the word cherish?)  Happy birthday, baby!  Sorry I ruined birthday presents for the rest of your life.  None of them will ever be as amazing as our little Jessi James!

I hope you have this much fun on your birthday this year!

It's my birthday! I do what I want!

Ladies and gentlemen, a year ago I never really thought that my blog would make it this far.  BrookJames Dot Com is turning one year old!  Crazy.  On July 23, 2008 I was sitting at work at LifeChurch.tv Fort Worth on a Wednesday night waiting for my band to arrive for run through for Switch.  I needed to start working on Pro Tools for the weekend setlist but I knew that once I started the band would arrive and I would be forced to stop in the middle of something and it would be difficult to pick up my place again the next day.  So instead I decided to start a blog.  What?  Yeah.  I thought the same thing, too.  Who knew?  It wasn’t a very impressive blog post.  As a matter of fact it was pretty much like everyone else’s.  It was called New To This.  Pretty self explanatory.  If you are super bored you can go back and read it.

So now that we have made it one full year I thought it would be kinda cool take a look back and see what has happened since the beginning.

• The blog started out on Blogspot and after a couple weeks was quickly moved to WordPress.

• After starting a blog and not expecting much out of myself I have now posted 224 times in this year.  One post every 1.6 days is not bad I would say.  61% is a pretty good grade right?

• One of the main things I wanted to do was start a conversation.  Right now there have been 508 comments this year (and my spam filter has blocked 747 comments…wow!).

• Another thing I really wanted to do was create a site that would be helpful to musicians and worship leaders.  There have been well over 1,000 hits to the Music Resources and Setlists pages!

• These were the top 10 most popular posts for the year (other than Star Wars affected posts).
  1. Web Site Hosting
  2. Growing Up
  3. Wipeout Update
  4. The Insanity That Is Craigslist Spam
  5. What Happens In Vegas…
  6. Week 3 (I Know!  Already!)
  7. Vegas Through The “i” Of The iPhone
  8. Fake Big Day(s)
  9. I Think I’m An Ass
  10. Weekend Update

• We have had some major things happen in our lives.  We left LifeChurch.tv, moved to California, found Kingsfield Church, took a trip to Israel (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 3 Pt. 2, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10), and I have been on and blogged about The Price Is Right and Wipeout!

• We have been through times when I blogged every day (or multiple posts a day) and times that I haven’t blogged for days on end.

• We elected a new President of the United States of America, our first black president.

• I love my wife and she still loves me!

I have loved being free to express myself in writing.  I love that people come here and have conversations with me.  I have loved getting to share my thoughts and opinions and craziness with you all.  I hope that God has used something here to inspire, encourage, challenge, help, and/or provide you with the much needed relief from normal life.  Thank you for patiently reading through my schizophrenic posts.  I hope the second year is just as great as the first was!  Come back and visit again!

May seeing Christ as He truly is be the death of everything that we are outside of who He is.  That’s my prayer for you.  When we really see Him we can be nothing but humbled.  May vision of You be the death of me.