In terms of numbers of visitors, yesterday was a pretty good day for this blog - and that kind of discouraged me a bit - it kind of made me feel like this whole blogging effort touches on futility. I must assure you that this is in no way a signal that I am going to retreat or quit blogging. No - I aim to go bull-headedly forward just as I have been. But still, yesterday was a mighty discouraging day for me as a blogger.
Saturdays tend to be my lowest visitor days of the week. Typically, on Saturdays, my readership drops off by more than 30 percent. But yesterday, Saturday, my readership soared to about three times the weekday average - somewhere between four and five times the usual Saturday average.
How could this be discouraging?
It happened because of one thing - these three words in my headline: "Sarah Palin's buick."
Actually, the word, "buick" was but a small part of it. It could have read, "Sarah Palin's dog... Sarah Palin's frog... Sarah Palin's duck... Sarah Palin's mop... Sarah Palin's oatmeal... ... etc. etc." The result would have been the same.
Oh well. Life is what it is, I am what I am, and will continue on as I have been until I find the time and means to do as I want and then I will all but ignore Sarah Palin, except as a teaser now and then to see if her name will still draw hordes of extra readers into my blog.
One good thing about this life is cats. Yesterday, I entered my office to find that my slideshow screen saver had been activated. Melanie's Diamond was on the screen and Pistol-Yero sat by the keyboard. When he visits, Kalib loves to watch all these grand cats scroll across my screen when I step away from my computer.
Also, please note the little contraptions sitting on my desk to the left. What you see is docks and harddrives. I can move harddrives in and out of those docks at will. I have more harddrives in the computer, and more harddrives stuck in old-fashioned enclosures lying here and there.
The three you see here are eacg two terabyte harddrives. There are several more 2 TB's sitting in a drawer beneath my computer.
A while back, I had an extremely bad hard drive nightmare and one of my good-hearted readers suggested that I pick up one of those little plastic-encased harddrives that can hold a terabyte and thus solve my information management problem.
I got a good chuckle out of that one - although I definitely appreciated the thought and concern.
I have a number of those little plastic hard drives. They are what I take into the field.
I shoot a lot, you see, and I shoot high resolution files RAW. I don't throw any images away, not even the blurry ones. It would take too much time. Plus, I have discovered that I can pick up a take a year or 20 after I first shot it and find that some of the images that I rejected are actually better than the ones I used.
I go through harddrive space like you would not believe. Tomorrow, I plan to buy two more two terabyte harddrives, but I really need to buy four or five more, if I could only afford to.
Yesterday, when I pulled into the Metro Cafe drive-through, it was Branson, the tiny hockey player, who came to greet me. He wanted to pose for a study. So here it is:
Study of the tiny hockey player, #242: Branson wears his Metro baseball cap as the young writer, Shoshana, prepares coffee in the background.
Then Branson decided that he wanted to do a study without his cap, so he took it off. His mom hurried right over to touch up his hair for the picture. So here it is:
Study of the tiny hockey player, #237: Carmen makes Brandon's hair look nice.
Study of the tiny hockey player, #239: Carmen admires the hair of her tiny hockey player.
Study of the tiny hockey player, #241: His hair looking good, Branson poses for Study #1.