One Thousand Hits

Los Angeles, California

About fifteen months ago, I sat down at a little, round, wooden table in the kitchen of Tucked In, the house we rent in Carmel each winter. My red Dell XPS laptop was open in front of me; my red Logitech mouse under my hand. I took a deep breath. Then, I took a great big, giant leap into the abyss of blogdom. Or so I thought. I mean, I did start my blog, but the anticipated abyss experience, not so much. Not that I knew that at the time, so I still want some cred for my courage.

My experience with blogs was fairly limited. I had purchased the book Julie & Julia, which is basically a blog transliterated to book form. I didn't like it much. In fact, it's one of the few books I've started to read but never finished. For those of you who saw the movie, but didn't read the book, you should be reminded that only half of the movie was based on this book. The half with Meryl Streep was based on an (auto)biography of Julia Child written with her nephew, Alex Prud'homme shortly before her death. That's a wonderful book, and I thought the movie would have been better if it had just been that half. But nobody ever listens to me.

Anyway, back to blogs. I was following a blog that I liked, which I still read today. It is called Orangette, and my blog probably somewhat faintly resembles it, as I have a tendency to be a sponge in all areas of my life, and this sometimes gets played out in syntax and writing styles. I was drawn to Molly Wizenberg's Orangette because it was long on food and short on Molly, though what was there about Molly was fun and interesting. I have long since forgiven her for the TMI of writing about losing her virginity, a story which she coupled with a recipe for Bread Salad with Cherries, Arugula, and (wait for it) Goat Cheese. For any of you following along, you might surmise that the goat cheese ingredient may have been my real issue about that particular post (I don't like goat cheese, which you can read about in previous posts available here, for free!). Anyway, Molly's wittiness and way with words, as well as a whole bunch of user-friendly recipes more than makes up what I consider to be the faux pas of sexual frankness amongst younger generations. But, what is that my business?

I also had a friend who started a blog. She wasn't a very close friend, but we had known each other for a long time. When she stopped answering my emails, I sent her a checking-in email to make sure she was alright. She wrote back as follows: If you want to know what is going on in my life, read my blog. Seriously. So, that set me WAY back on blogs. After all, what I got from that written comment (and knowing her well enough) was that in the future there would not be a dialog, but a lot of diatribes. No thank you very much.

So, I still had never considered writing a blog when I met Andrea Stark at a cocktail party in Lake Tahoe. I've chronicled this meeting in a previous post (available here, for free!), but I'll recap. She had just finished graduate school with a degree in Journalism, and she had started her blog the day before we met. She convinced me that this was a good idea (no small feat, in that I just met her that night, and I had come to the party without any thought of writing a blog, but came away considering it), as a blog could be a commitment to regular writing (what about my journal? Oh yeah, no one needs to read those rantings of a mad woman, so never mind). Anyway, after that conversation, I let the idea marinate for about five months, and then came that fateful day in the kitchen in Carmel.

I debated for about a nanosecond about what to call my blog. What would Sandra do? was a part of our daily vernacular here at Casa Healy. We continue to use it both in jest, and in times of serious decision-making. I had once told Sandra that I wanted to start an advice column, and call it What Would Sandra Do? As I recall, she said she would need to provide input on that. This, probably as a reflection of her wavering confidence in my ability to competently give advice. Point well taken. In practice, I have strayed a bit from my blog's original concept of questioning what would Sandra do? in various aspects of life. But I love the name, and consider it an homage to the wonderfulness of our very special friend, Sandra. So, WWSD it is, and so shall it remain.

Both Andrea and Molly used Google for their blogs, so I opened a gmail account and proceeded to set up my blog on Blogspot. This was not without incident. In fact, utilizing Blogspot is still at times confounding. I could never figure out how to set up a template for the recipes, so I have to figure out the layout of them every time I put one in, which is roughly every other post. Once the post is published, the indentations change and I have to put the post back into editing mode over and over again to get it to look halfway lined up. It's a challenge, and I suppose others have mastered this way better than me. But, let's be honest, design was never intended to be the strong suit of my blog. Nor photos, since I have only included three so far.

What I hope is the strength of my blog is my writing. Some of you have told me that you enjoy my sense of humor. Our special friend, Tracey, who lives in Hawaii (and who we call Lucy, but that's another post . . .), wrote that she enjoys reading my blog because she can hear my voice. That pleases me as writing a blog can feel like sitting in a room talking to yourself. So, I'm always happy to hear from readers, because it helps with that tree-falling-in-the-forest aspect of writing a blog. And I have especially enjoyed the comments that people have left on my posts, whether truly anonymously or you're-not-fooling-anybody-I-know-that-it's-you. So please do feel free and encouraged to leave a comment.

While I started blogging only as an exercise in writing, I soon realized that I really did want people to read what I wrote, and that I hoped they would enjoy at least some of it. When I began the blog, I told only a handful of people about it and more or less forbade them to read it. I didn't want to hold anyone hostage, in the way my blogging friend had attempted to hold me. And I was self-conscious about it. But, as time went by, I recanted and asked a few of my friends to check it out. Then I told a few more people about it. I haven't taken out any billboards for it (yet!), but gradually I have become more comfortable with my friends reading it, and I've enjoyed their feedback about it. Everyone has been kindly tolerant.

I know that some posts are better than others. I have my favorites. Other ones are not so good at all, especially the early ones when I was trying to find my way (I think my embarrassingly worst one is entitled This Side of Paradise. It is available here, but please, let's not go there). I know that there are errors, because I am still catching them. I'm careless with spellcheck, and have been known to change tenses midstream. I am still making changes and correcting errors even on the older posts; closing a parenthesis (I got a million of 'em) here and there, and tidying up in general. I am a relentless editor. I could take one post and continue to rewrite it on and on ad infinitum. But at some point, even I have to let the little posts go out into the world and be who they are. I am now fifteen months into the project. My blog has legs, though, at times, wobbly ones. It has taken on a life of it's own, and like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, it has let its own personality emerge. Even I sometimes wonder, who wrote THAT? And, of course, I more often wonder who read that? For in the middle of this month I passed the threshold of one thousand hits -- a hit (for those of you who don't know this) being a time when someone has navigated to my blog. So there is either one of you out there who has visited my blog a thousand times, or ten of you who have each looked at it a hundred times, or perhaps a thousand random web surfers who each landed there once and then got the hell out of Dodge. Who knows? It's a mystery.

Anyway, whatever your numbers out there, I thought you might be interested in my sharing some of the stats about my blog with you.


My Favorite Post:              It's so hard to choose a favorite amongst
                                                         your children. I am rather partial to both
                                                         The Monogram, and  Going To the
                                                         Mattresses (both posts available
                                                         here for free!)
 
Most Popular Post:           Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas


Most Hits in One Day:      20 (on April 21, 2011)

Average Hits in
One Month (currently):  157                          


Country of Origin
of Most Hits:                         USA (duh!)


Country of Origin
of Least Hits:                        Argentina


Total Countries of
Origin of Hits:                       15


Those Countries Are:     United States, Slovenia, Russia, China,
                                                          South Korea, India, Germany, Canada,
                                                          Norway, Poland, Malaysia, Singapore,
                                                          Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and
                                                          Argentina (Don't cry for me . . .)


So, there you go. I have every intention of continuing to write What Would Sandra Do. I am also planning to enable the "Followers" gadget, so that you can become a follower if you are so inclined. I'm not quite sure why any of us would want to do that, but people have asked about it. I had some problems with it in the beginning, but hopefully I'll be able to set it up at some time in the future, now that I am no longer such a novice blogger.

And so, as the sun sets over the XPS we see our blogger riding off into the sunset with his trusty friend, the flying squirrel. Oops. I think I just dropped into a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon episode. Oh well. I told you I was a sponge. So, Sorry about that, Chief. Thanks for reading my blog, all one or one thousand of you. Really.