I just wanted to take a minute to say a HUGE "Thank You" to all of my faithful readers here! In less than a year, almost 1000 of you have visited the blog and read my ramblings, either as one time visitors or repeat "offenders" (or "offendees" perhaps?).
While suffering with the fringes of a cold, I haven't managed to get my mucus-clogged head to focus on what Kelly is trying to show me from Scotland for the next chapter of "A Wild Tiger's Heart". It's something like trying to swim in a mud puddle - lots of thrashing, but not a whole lot of progress. So while pulling out the proper words to describe the scenery is like trying to extract DNA from a Q-Tip that was soaked in bleach, I've been checking traffic reports to the various places where such information is monitored for me by the various accounts I hold.
The above figure for this blog impressed me. I started this as a way to prove to a friend that no one really reads his blogs except for his family and friends. I purposefully chose a site for my blog that would show where the visitors came from, quite positive that the primary group who would come to visit my blog were going to be from the United States, and that a good percentage of those folks were going to be from New England, where most of my family and friends live.
I was SO wrong!
I guess it never really struck me that, when my publisher had me sign a "redistribution clause" when Write Words Inc bought out Ellsworth, Maine based ebooksonthe.net in 2002, they REALLY meant to distribute my work in any country who would be willing to pick the books up. The number of countries represented as "hits" to this blog site blew me away.......
Of course, on the flip side, I was amused by the audience that goes to the web site I've had up since I was looking for something to amuse me in 1998, when I was out of work because of a bulge in a disc in my lower back, on heavy duty pain medication, and limited on what I could do by severe restrictions from my doctor. So, what can a very active person do with life when restricted to "no bending, no lifting, no twisting"? Obviously, they can learn how to program HTML pages and put together a web site to showcase poems, other writings, and photos.
"The Northern Bard" also attracts visitors from all over the world, but the amusing part is that most of them seem to be attracted to pictures that I posted in 2001, when my husband and I, armed with a large IRS refund, took our children on a two week long vacation to Florida and back, a trip made in a Dodge Caravan that we had purchased just shortly before leaving Maine. (We were driving a Dodge Omni, but our son had just had a growth spurt and was no longer able to sit in the back, and my continued difficulty moving made it impossible for me to let him ride in the front seat for the duration. We traded the Omni for the Caravan, as it had TWO back seats, allowing our daughter to take up one whole seat and our son to take up the other.) The most popular page of my entire web site seems to be the photographs we took in Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida....
While suffering with the fringes of a cold, I haven't managed to get my mucus-clogged head to focus on what Kelly is trying to show me from Scotland for the next chapter of "A Wild Tiger's Heart". It's something like trying to swim in a mud puddle - lots of thrashing, but not a whole lot of progress. So while pulling out the proper words to describe the scenery is like trying to extract DNA from a Q-Tip that was soaked in bleach, I've been checking traffic reports to the various places where such information is monitored for me by the various accounts I hold.
The above figure for this blog impressed me. I started this as a way to prove to a friend that no one really reads his blogs except for his family and friends. I purposefully chose a site for my blog that would show where the visitors came from, quite positive that the primary group who would come to visit my blog were going to be from the United States, and that a good percentage of those folks were going to be from New England, where most of my family and friends live.
I was SO wrong!
I guess it never really struck me that, when my publisher had me sign a "redistribution clause" when Write Words Inc bought out Ellsworth, Maine based ebooksonthe.net in 2002, they REALLY meant to distribute my work in any country who would be willing to pick the books up. The number of countries represented as "hits" to this blog site blew me away.......
Of course, on the flip side, I was amused by the audience that goes to the web site I've had up since I was looking for something to amuse me in 1998, when I was out of work because of a bulge in a disc in my lower back, on heavy duty pain medication, and limited on what I could do by severe restrictions from my doctor. So, what can a very active person do with life when restricted to "no bending, no lifting, no twisting"? Obviously, they can learn how to program HTML pages and put together a web site to showcase poems, other writings, and photos.
"The Northern Bard" also attracts visitors from all over the world, but the amusing part is that most of them seem to be attracted to pictures that I posted in 2001, when my husband and I, armed with a large IRS refund, took our children on a two week long vacation to Florida and back, a trip made in a Dodge Caravan that we had purchased just shortly before leaving Maine. (We were driving a Dodge Omni, but our son had just had a growth spurt and was no longer able to sit in the back, and my continued difficulty moving made it impossible for me to let him ride in the front seat for the duration. We traded the Omni for the Caravan, as it had TWO back seats, allowing our daughter to take up one whole seat and our son to take up the other.) The most popular page of my entire web site seems to be the photographs we took in Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida....
(For those who haven't been to The Northern Bard, found at this link - http://galadriel_emmons.tripod.com/ - the photos of Busch Gardens are part of the story of the places we visited, the fun/odd things we encountered, and the reaction of our children to having one special trip that WASN'T a camping vacation. The story is called "The 2001 Vacation Odyssey of Avatar and Galadriel", as we were still going into a chat room called "Quick Chat Cafe" at the time, and those were our "secret identities" that we used in chat.)
So, thank you again for coming to visit me here and for reading my words, such as they are, and giving your feedback, whether in public or in private. I can't tell you how much it warms my heart to know that there are people whom I haven't actually met and who don't actually share my bloodline who have been to visit. Now to go and apologise to the friend who suggested that I needed a blog.......
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