numbers – Page 3 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I started blogging in… 2004, I think, when a grad school friend of mine suggested that a bunch of us start sites at Xanga. That blog lasted five years of mostly-daily publishing through the first three or four years and then a slow decline over the last year. A year and a half or so ago I got dragged back into a new Xanga site at the suggestion of a friend I’d met through the first blog, and then Xanga exploded and I moved operations over here.

In six or so years of blogging at Xanga, I got around a hundred and twenty thousand hits. Here’s the traffic from my first year at WordPress:

…so I’m at half the traffic of six years of blogging at another site, in a year. Traffic’s dropped way off from wintertime but that’s because I’ve invested less time into babysitting the site; it’s starting to climb back up again lately and I’m fine with that. All said, nearly sixty-five thousand hits in a year is not something that I feel like complaining about. It’s awesome.

What? You want more nerd stuff? Okay:

I am down to mostly third-world countries, Islamist theocracies, and Communist strongholds as far as countries that I haven’t seen traffic from yet. And Kosovo. Seriously, Kosovo, what the hell is your deal, what did I do to you? I’ve had so much traffic from the rest of Europe that I’m starting to wonder if WordPress thinks Kosovo is a country just for this map but actually interprets traffic from there as being from someplace else. And somebody hitting me up from Svalbard island would be nice, but I think there are only seeds and ice there and I don’t think seeds and ice use the Internet.

One more, while I’m sharing numbers:

That followers number staggers me, even as I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much– I had one random couple of days a few months ago where I inexplicably got almost a thousand page views in a day, but there are nowhere near three thousand people coming here even on a monthly basis, so I suspect the majority of those followers are bots or fly-bys. Still, though, when I look at most of the other blogs I read, three thousand seems like a lot for people who aren’t otherwise celebrities or well-known, and I’m certainly not that.

So, yeah. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this place over the last year but I think it’s been worth it and it’s been a lot of fun. We’ll see how the next year goes. Hopefully Kosovo will show up so I can start shooting for Liechtenstein and Vatican City. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

(Actually, let’s not make that a three-word thing: Seriously. Thanks for reading. Y’all are awesome. I mean it.)

This is a true story, I promise: the boy has had a mild case of foot-and-mouth for the last few days. I’m home on Winter Break anyway, so it’s not like it’s mattered; I was supposed to be home anyway so it didn’t lead to any change in anyone’s schedule. He’s cleared up– the red spots are still there but he’s not contagious anymore, and we figured we could send him to day care today so I could get some stuff done around the house that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Less than an hour after we dropped him off we got the “Uh-uh, come get him” call– apparently H&M has been tearing its way through the day care lately (what a surprise, eh?) and they’re not taking any chances. So, my first “drop everything and come get your kid from school” call.

He feels fine– he’s been running around the house like a maniac since we got home, and I’ve been keeping half an ear on him while getting a couple of minor things done around the house since it’s not like he’s staying in the same room for more than three or four seconds anyway.

I hope this admission does not make me too terribly ridiculous: I, uh, tend to… sing to myself, occasionally? when I’m doing things around the house? One of our dogs is named Hector. We call him Tor most of the time, and silly songs based on the dog and changing his name around have kind of become a thing around here. So as I was letting the dogs in (covered in snow, both of them) I was singing at Hector. The boy, as it turns out, was standing in the kitchen (which is right off our laundry room, which is where the dogs come in from the back yard) and heard me do this.

The song is actually relevant: “Tor is the snowiest Hector,” to the song of “One is the loneliest number” by Three Dog Night. Go ahead, take a minute and imagine; I’ll allow it.

I walk into the kitchen, still singing, and make eye contact with the boy.

He screams “NO!” at me and runs out of the room. Top speed.

Uh. OK. I start following him; he’s gone. It takes a minute or two to determine that he’s run to his room. The picture at the top of this post is of the mat in his room. I walk in and he is tearing it apart. He grabs the number one and throws it at me.

“One! One is loneliest number! Not Tor! No!”

I have a weird-ass kid, but at least he has decent taste in music.

Edited with BlogPad Pro