Where was I?
Oh. Posting a sad poem on last year's Sept 11. (NP pointed that out when we were doing a photo walk in Oakmont.) So this post is meant to push that one down the page a bit.
NP and I took a photo walk in Oakmont this past weekend and we both got a lot of great shots around the river and up into the neighborhood a bit. But then something weird happened as I was loading the photos off my camera, and I lost them all. Yes I did.
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We rarely get comments on our blog posts. (I've decided today to write in plural, being in the mindset that the blog and its contents are ours - mine and yours.)
But we got this comment today on a post from a month ago:
Thanks for the article, I read it and the post and I have to say that this all gets more confusing when you are new to all this,just when I think I understand it all, someone throws in something new. I guess I will all click in to place at some stage!
It ended with a link, which I've deleted.
It's vague enough to make me think it might have been legit, but vague enough to make me think it was phony. The link clinched it. It went to a viagra site. We deleted the comment.
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My posts here are automatically added to my Facebook account as a note. That's good in some ways, I guess. My friends and "friends" see my writing and it's easy for them to comment on it there.
That's bad news too. Comments on Facebook notes don't last like comments directly on the blog thing. There could end up being two separate threads of comments. That stuff bothers me more than maybe it should.
But it does bother me. So I severed the ties between this here and the FB, which doesn't seem to offer any flexibility about what is shared. I'd like it to share just a link and an excerpt so people would then click over to here to read the thing and write their adoring comments (Thanks, Beth!).
If you want to be notified when a new post appears here, you can subscribe to this blog's feed by clicking the "Subscribe to this blog's feed" link in the right column there. And once you're here, you can send a link to your own FB account with the share button below each post.
Of course, I'll have to start writing posts that are worth sharing. Soon, okay? It's taking a while to get my voice back.
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I was playing around with the access logs for this site and saw a curious spike in pageviews on April 11. A big spike. Ninety site visits instead of three or zero. Turns out the page those 90 people had come to visit was this one from 2004, which relates a story about a stump turtle. (That page is the top Google hit for that term.) Someone somewhere must have mentioned that phenomenon on that day.
Well, that was boring. Anyone know a joke?
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Since I've gone and blown the dust off the damn blog I figure I'll make use of NaBloPoMo to provide some motivation to write every day.
National Blog Posting Month is a monthly thing -- An event? A contest? I dunno. -- in which participants try to blog every day of the month. If successful, you, dear reader, will get a month's worth of nonsense from caleb walker and I'll get something better than that, I hope. A sticker or gif badge or something.
May's theme for daily blogging: MAYBE. Maybe can sound like a wishy-washy word, a non-commitment. It can show ambivalence, being of two minds about something. Or maybe can also be seen as a word embodying potential -- maybe looks to the future, to possibilities, to things that may happen. May is a great month for exploring future wishes as well as looking at the words as they scroll across the screen, planning how you'll move them from "maybe" to "yes." Images can explore the unknown, things that may be.
So look for 31 excellent posts on that theme. Maybe.
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Lately I haven't had anything good to say — or very little, anyway — and those few good things have gone onto facebook. But you know, to hell with facebook. I'm paying (a paltry amount) to keep CalebWalker going so I might as well use it.
So. What can I say?
I have a new car. I donated Bob to the Kidney Foundation, who sold him for "less than $500," the letter I got said. The new car is a blue '08 Civic I've given an unimaginative androgenous name: Blue. That's like naming your dog Blackie. NP saw the spoiler and called Blue my mid-life crisis car. That sounds about right. My mid-life crisis car is a three-year-old Honda Civic with a spoiler.
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This is somewhat interesting. The post I made on this blog on this date seven years ago was the first one.
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I'm participating in NaBloPoMo.
What that means is that I'll be trying to post something every day in November. Though lately I haven't been actually, you know, writing actual, you know, posts here, I've been thinking about the old blog while doing other things. Things like looking for a job, polishing up a story and sending it to a few literary journals, and trying to start a new story.
To start, how about this: We've got three boxes of Trader Joe's cereal in the house and I can't stand any of them. TJ's is great for a lot of things, but cereal? Bleagh.
Yes, it's gonna be a wild month.
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Today is the sixth birthday of this blog. It's probably not a good idea to do this, but let's look at the number of posts I've made over the years.
| 2002-03 | 143 |
| 2003-04 | 211 |
| 2004-05 | 212 |
| 2005-06 | 153 |
| 2006-07 | 123 |
| 2007-08 | 83 |
Oof. See that miserable 07-08 number? That includes the highest count in a month, my first participation in NaBloPoMo, in which I posted 30 times in November 07.
Highest post count in a non-NaBloPoMo month: 24 - Apr 02, Sep 04 (tie)
Lowest post count in a month: 3 - Sep 07
There you have it. See you next year.
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I'm a little surprised at the level of disappointment I feel from not winning a NaBloPoMo prize. Yesterday the winners were announced and Caleb Walker was not on the list. Now, yesterday the participants got an email asking who had become pregnant during NaBlo "...so I can get you on the shortlist," and now I'm wondering if I would have had a better shot at a prize if I'd become mit bambino.
To offset that disappointment I took our clothes dryer apart yesterday. It's laying in big chunks in the basement now as it waits for a new, unbroken belt to arrive in the mail. Turns out Home Depot doesn't have parts like that but it does have a website where you can order them. Just like the big bookstores lately, which don't actually have what you want, but they're happy to order it.
Anyway, have a good Monday, everyone. Stay home if you can. Nobody should have to go to work in the freeing rain we're having this morning.
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