Spare yourself if you find my Diary stuff tiresome:
Am I to write a great book that no one will ever read or am I to continue writing poorly edited blog posts on the fly for the entertainment of 250 possibly demented readers to read daily? Search me.
This is another post prologue in the “Harry’s Diary” category to explain what I’m up to, my excuses today for a hurried post (the next one Rosebud) and who knows what else.
I crashed last night at 9 after reading another couple chapters in my latest discovery, a book about the Civil War and the five surviving Presidents who, along with Lincoln, in their own ways helped precipitate or delay the war between the states. For the moment I can now recite the Presidents between Jackson and Lincoln in order. Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Poke, Zachary Taylor, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanon. Cool!
The book has given me a chance to wake up early in the morning thinking about US History and not the Duluth Schools. A few days earlier it was a work of fiction and a Man Booker award winner, The Narrow Road to the Far North, that had me waking up after too little sleep thinking about the horrors of Japanese POW camps. That too was a reprieve for me as I wait endlessly for Attorney Mary Rice to give us her take on the travails of Art Johnston. If I don’t like what she says I’ll make a fuss pointing out that all the people she talked to could have lied through their teeth because there was no penalty for them to lie to her since her report will not be an official court document holding her interviewees that would hold them responsible for the crime of perjury.
So I’ve put my huge box of newspaper clippings about ISD 709 against the door to prevent my cat Moloch from breaking in and bugging me for food and placed a vintage soda pop I bought on impulse a month ago from Ace Hardware (Nesbitt’s California Honey Lemonade)at my side and begin.
I was pleased this morning to discover upon waking up far too early that my blog’s hit counter was working again. It had stopped last Wednesday and I was perturbed because I like to see how many folks come by every couple days or so. A second counter was still running, one I don’t check out perhaps because I don’t believe it. This other counter usually puts the number of visitors at four times the number of the counter I rely on.
I’m sure there is some good reason for there to be two counters with conflicting information available to me but I’m too lazy to research the reason for this. At any rate the now functioning counter showed me that my readership has remained steady at between 250 to 300 visitors a day, that they tend to return on average about 2.75 times a month and that over any given month I get between 2000 to 2700 of them as “unique visitors.” I even can see from what countries servers they arrive. Perhaps a third of them only come for a few seconds from the Ukraine, China, Israel etc. perhaps drawn in my my lofty use of Lincoln in the blog’s title. You can all send me thank you emails later for this full disclosure.
Among the day’s highlights, I dressed for church then skipped it due to a miscommunication with Claudia. I read the book on Presidents instead. I did join the grandsons and their parents for lunch afterward then returned home as Claudia had to pack for an overnight to Seminary. She had finished her paper on “Predestination” so late Saturday night that we didn’t get to the Symphony we had season tickets for.
My daughter had gotten very little sleep herself that night – shades of her father? -because of the Master’s degree in Education that she is working on so. I offered to take the boys agate hunting while she slept and my son-in-law watched the Vikings game. My daughter got three hours of catch up sleep which was a much better gift than the my son-in-law got for his time in front of the tube. It didn’t help that the Packers prevailed after the Vikings loss. A double dose of travail.
Sans Grandma who was at college I went over to my daughter’s house and was treated to a Sunday meal, part of our family routine, and was treated to a fireworks exhibition afterward after a couple boxes of old July 4th sparklers had been unearthed in a cleaning of the basement. Rather than stay, sans Claudia, tp watch “Mystery” with the family on PBS I sang half of my grandsons to sleep (the tough one) and departed early for home. There I read another couple chapters of the Presidents and went to bed…..until I woke up at 2:30 with a restless mind…….now on to Rosebud.
