I've yet to officially celebrate any of my milestones here, so I'm going to do a little bit now. I have often seen people celebrating follower counts, post counts of reputation level and I will do a little bit of that, but I also want to celebrate some of the great friends I've made here and some of the great communities and initiatives I've been part of.
So I'll celebrate some of my stats over this 60 days. My current rep is 55.892. I think this is likely my biggest achievement so far, although I'm still not entirely sure just how important it is, but it's pretty cool.
The thing that excites me the most is getting my vote slider yesterday as well. I have always been voting like crazy and my vote power would constantly fluctuate between 20-40%. Now I can have more control over it, although I'm still not sure how I'm going to make the best use of it, to try to keep my vote power high as well. I would also like to start voting on comments that are left on my posts as I do really appreciate that feedback, but never had to vote power and it was never leaving anything anyways.
My current follower count is 388. I think that's pretty darn good. I know a lot of people have a lot more, but I'm also quite proud of this as well.
My post count is 1372, of course most are comments. I try to post a new blog at least 1-2/day, but I have skipped a few days along the way. I try to change it up a bit. About half my posts are silver related and the other half about some other hobby or about steem itself. I do feel I should probably be trying harder to respond to my comments and engage in more conversations in other comment sections.
My current STEEM Power is 552.403, (I'd say approximately 350 of it was purchased) I also plan to continue to invest in my steem power and into the platform. I've had some really good post payouts along that way, that really got my excited about being here.
My best post was this one which earn $129.17. It was one of my steemlords story and it went crazy after it was voted on by 
Yesterday I also had this post about winning a weight loss contest get a huge vote from 
Anyways enough of the congratulations, it's now time for the reflections.
My first 30 days here were pretty slow, I was slow to understand exactly what was going on and how best to fit in. My posts would routinely get 0.05-0.30, and honestly is was a bit discouraging. I would make more on a few votes from comments I would leave for a few whales that I followed and engaged with.
I feel like everything changed when I joined the steemlords event and started to make some friends. I also started to understand that the platform was more about community and there are real people behind all these accounts. I also found discord chat and the minnow support project and started to really feel like I was part of something bigger. I started to feel more connected with my original crew here at Steemsilvergold. I started to comment and engage more with the members there and really become and active member of that community. I also found a great community at thealliance and have been making some friends there and helping to support each other's growth and success on this platform. Through my steemlords friends I learned of the teamaustralia community and all the great things they are doing there to support each other and have continued to make great friends there. More recently one of my steemsilvergold and old youtube buddies a fellow canadian, took a page from the teamaustralia book, started a teamcanada initiative which has been another awesome community to be a part of around here.
Now I find myself spending more and more time, hanging out in discord chat and spending less time blogging and commenting. I am also enjoying that much more and feeling much more engaged with the community and new friends around here.
I do want to take a quick moment to also apologize for my inactivity here the last week. So much of my time recently has been trying to get everything figured out for the steem coin project we are working on and how to best deal with the pending orders. We also have lots of work to get the website setup for the traffic as well and arranging to accept bitcoin payments and USD funds. We are also having a big sale and new releases this weekend which also required a lot of my free time in the evenings recently. PS if your a silver stacker check out https://www.phelimint.com for the sale.
