General – Page 9

56,307

With NaNoWriMo 2009 wrapping up, I’m going to call it a night. My final tally is 56,307 words, just barely eclipsing my total of four years ago.

In your face, 2005!

I hadn’t planned on writing that much after crossing the 50,000 threshold two days ago, and only a modest effort yesterday, but I had a lot of seat time on the MAX today and Ellie wasn’t hedgehogging me too much tonight, so that left more time for writing than usual. And then I thought it would be nice to get at least 55,000 words, and by then I was within shouting distance of my previous total, so …

I’ve got a backlog building of pictures to edit, as well as edited pictures to put online, so stay tuned. In addition to the recent pictures of Scout, there are pictures coming of Sam, Emma, and Ellie as I’ve tried to get at least one decent picture of the pets with the new camera.

There are also wildlife pictures to come, as I went to Ridgefield 3 out of the 4 days of the Thanksgiving break, and remembered to bring a battery for the new camera 2 out of 3 times! Did I see bald eagles? Great blue herons? Great white sharks?

You’ll have to tune in to find out!

50,000

I’m two for two.

After reaching the 50,000 word goal for National Novel Writing Month in 2005, I did it again this year, hitting 50,737 words according to the NaNoWriMo validator.

And with two days left to spare!

Not quite the tour de force of 2005, where I crossed the 50,000 word mark a week early and ended up with 56,251 words by the end of the month.

The “novel”, such as it is, was a lot of fun to write but is still a complete mess. Sometimes a character will morph into another mid-chapter when I realize it’s really better suited for a different part of the book. There are huge gaps in the timeline, missing sections of the story, and all of that, so after the end of the month I’ll need to fire up my outliner and start making some structure out of the madness.

Not a bad show, though, especially given that I got behind in the early going until I mounted a steady comeback that took me over the top.

Three cheers for Boolie! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip … shhhhh, quiet now, let’s keep it down. Sammy’s sleeping on my lap and Ellie is snoring behind me.

The Things I Learn When Scout Sleeps On Me

When Scout sleeps on me while I’m sitting in my chair, she likes to stretch out like Superman across my chest so I can’t really get much done. This evening I had my laptop beside her and could surf the Web but not type.

While browsing I came across a site that reports the demographics of the U.S. audience of a web site relative to the average (and as we all know, my site is far above average). I have no idea how they estimate this or if it’s even remotely accurate, but here’s what it reports about my site:

I do really well in the age group of 3-11 year olds, accounting for one out of every five of my visitors. Probably attracted by the frequent poop references in recent days.
I have a higher than normal incidence of visitors with children. Oh no! Babies having babies!
In regards to earning power, the report says I attract a less affluent audience. To my three year old readers: I’m very, very disappointed in you.
For education level, it reports a high index of college graduates. Oh three year olds, I’m so sorry! I take it back! I’m very, very proud of you! But you probably should have majored in something other than art history.

This Year’s Vacation Notice

My whiteboard art doesn’t seem to be getting better from year to year, although I am making increasing use of color. I’m hoping that my art form (known as stickism) will catch on and I can start paying for my meals by signing napkins like Picasso.

ObamaNation

Wow.

This is the first time I’ve ever voted for a Presidential candidate who won and the first time I felt emotionally invested. While I’m sure there will be bumps and setbacks on the road ahead, I’m just glad we’re going down this road.

Citizen Boolie

I walked to the local library branch today to drop off our ballots. Oregon has a fantastic vote-by-mail system that allows you to fill out your ballot on your own schedule while reading information on the candidates and initiatives. I wish every state made it this easy to vote.

I’ve never voted for a winning President so hopefully I didn’t jinx my choice. I’m an independent and didn’t vote a straight ticket, but I do find it amusing that the Republicans are running an add that claims the government doesn’t work well when it is dominated by one party.

I don’t remember any complaints when they were the dominant party …

Six Months

About six months ago I started tracking my web site traffic and during that time there have been 12,455 visitors from 115 countries.

A few quick thoughts:

80% of my traffic comes from the United States, which is not as high as I expected.
Visitors came from most of the Americas and Europe, much of Asia, all of Australia (all or nothing there), but not so much in Africa.
In Asia, I was rarely visited by countries that end in stan.
87 countries have visited at least twice in those six months.
47 countries visited an average of at least once a month.
15 countries visited an average of at least once a week.
5 countries visited an average of at least once a day.
The top six countries show the long arm of the British Empire: the US, Canada, India, the UK, Ireland, and Australia.
The next six countries show the long arm of Google: the Philippines, South Africa, Germany, Malaysia, Hungary, and Singapore.
I received no visits from the United Republic of Templeton, which upon further research turns out not to be a real country and was never in fact ruled by a little gray cat. In my defense, his passport looked very authentic, it had holograms and everything!
Traffic dipped noticeably during the summer when students were out of school here in the States.
The top search term that brought people to my site? Pictures of moths. Moths! I only have one moth picture on my entire site and it’s not very good. And I’m not ranked highly in either Google or Yahoo for that term, but perhaps I had a brief moment of glory sometimes in those six months.
The majority of visitors referred by search engines are looking for reptile pictures, where my site is currently ranked third in Google. Those hacks at National Geographic are ranked number one so I suppose I have little chance of being top dog. Maybe I should start focusing on moths …
I did notice a number of people arriving at my post called Fleabitis and felt a little guilty about that, since people looking for information on their medical condition are probably not in the mood for me cracking wise about Scout’s flea allergy, so I added a note that the correct spelling is phlebitis and provided a link for more medical info. Whoever thought there could be a downside to me making puns about my cats?

Vacation

A quick update from the road, instead of going to Yellowstone and the Tetons this fall like I normally do, I decided to stay more local and go to Mount Rainier National Park and Olympic National Park.

I finished my stay in Mount Rainier yesterday and had a great visit (despite the weather) and am about to head out to the Hoh Rainforest for some good ol’ forest hiking. I focused on the higher altitude trails in Rainier instead of the lowland forests since I knew I was coming here, but I’m ready for a day of trails with giant trees and little altitude change!

Once I edit the pictures there will be new galleries for hoary marmots and sooty grouse, the marmot gallery in particular should have a number of pictures. I spent a lot of time watching marmots and pikas in the talus fields with Mount Rainier as the backdrop (when the clouds didn’t cover it). I had never seen hoary marmots before and often based my hiking plans on trails with the best marmot and pika viewing opportunities.

We all have our priorities.

There will also be updates to the existing galleries for pika, black-tailed deer, Townsend’s chipmunk, and golden-mantled ground squirrel (or possibly a new Cascade golden-mantled ground squirrel gallery, I need to pin down the species ID).

Oh and a new black bear picture or two, apparently you don’t have to travel to Yellowstone to see bears …

Transplants

So far the plants I moved a few weeks ago are all doing fine. I’m glad I got them established as we’re in the midst of a record heat wave.

I had moved about about a dozen strawberry plants that were growing too close to the fence, and not only did they survive but every one of them is blooming! Even the littlest one has a nice white flower that came up during the week.

We’ve got a couple dozen plants now, all propagated from the few sickly survivors I rescued while clearing the forest of weeds when we bought the house. They responded well to getting more sun when the grapes were pulled up and last year produced a number of offshoots. The berries from the original plants are quite tasty and I have high hopes for the new ones, providing the slugs save a few for me.

The blueberry bush I moved has also survived and this week started to put out a few flowers. It isn’t the sunniest spot in the yard but better than before. If it does well I might move the other two next year into more sun near the raspberries, but I’ve avoided doing anything near the house since we’re getting a new roof in a few weeks and I figure there will be some plant casualties as they work.

If these transplants prove to be a success I’ll try something more challenging, like kidneys or livers.

Visitations Part II

Some more quick thoughts on my web traffic since my last update:

I was mistaken earlier when I said that I had been visited by 49 states with West Virginia the lone holdout. It turns out West Virginia hadn’t visited, that part was true, but neither had Delaware or Rhode Island. West Virginia did visit this week, followed by Delaware, and then finally Rhode Island, so all 50 states have now stopped by. Drinks are on me!
I am unpopular with the druids. Exactly zero visits from the towns around Stonehenge. Zero! This may hurt my chances at becoming Archdruid.
I am also unpopular in Japan (Finland and China have since clocked in, so Japan is the lone holdout of countries I’ve visited). Perhaps the druids have taken over Japan. I need to look into this.
Each country has a two letter identifier at the end of their Internet address, except for the US, which is only fair since Al Gore did invent the Internet. Much like two letter identifiers for the states of the US, however, some of them are not for the countries I expected. For example, did you know that Switzerland is ch, so China is not ch but cn, and Canada is not cn but eh?
Canada has visited but at a much lower rate than I expected compared to the US. I had planned to run a targeted campaign by blogging about hockey sticks and Pocky sticks (attracting both Canadians and the druid-Japanese), but I no longer believe it will be enough to attract my friends to the north. What we need is an invasion. Fifty-Four Forty or Fight! Who’s with me? Hello? Anyone? Hello?