What's going on out there?

Hits on this blog have taken a notable upturn over the last two months. Where before I was getting about 20-25 a day on average, most of them no doubt from a handful of loyal readers, over the last six weeks we've averaged more like 50 a day. This is wonderful, of course, and I welcome whoever stops by, but who the heck are you people and where are you coming from?

Actually, I can find that out, thanks to Site Meter.

For example, among the last 100 visitors was one from Trinidad and Tobago, who stopped by to read the review of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And there was a visitor from Singapore, who got caught up in the whole Conocarpus lancifolius saga from some years back. That series of posts, actually, has produced a lot of traffic from around the Indian Ocean basin. This blog actually collects just about every scrap of information about those trees that appears on the internet anywhere, so that's not hard to understand. Someone way up in the frozen north of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, dropped in to read Part I of my What is the U.S. Doing in Djibouti series. Which I never did finish.

Actually, apart from Conocarpus lancifolius, the three things that seem to bring most serchers to this blog are, in order, pottery pictures (pity I can't make any more for a while), Willa Cather's O Pioneers (no doubt high school students looking for a way out of reading it), and a picture of a King Air I posted about four years ago. Lots of people look for that King Air. I don't even remember why I posted it.

One recent visitor, however, ran a Google search for, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" and found a post I'd written under that title. I have no idea what they were really looking for, but I hope they found it eventually.

Ah well. I didn't have much to say today. I applied for three jobs today, in two different cities. It would be nice to get at least one of them (particularly the one up yonder in that other state). Oh, and I started rewriting Lauderdale over the weekend, too. Got almost 2000 words in yesterday. If I keep up a 2000-word-per-day pace, I'll have it finished by... hmm, including time off for the honeymoon... Gee, May 24th. That's not so bad. I think I'll set "End of June" as my goal, though.