At Least The Bots Seem To Like Me

My hit count jumped to 30 in the first 24 hours this blog was live. I was not expecting that. It felt very nice to wake up this morning and be told by Blogger that this new blog of mine had been viewed more than two dozen times. I've had blogs I've actively promoted before and I've only once ever had that many hits in a day. And that day I blogged about something all controversial and had crazy people fighting with each other in my comments.

Of course, then it occurred to me that most of those hits were probably bots of some kind.

At first, that thought kind of bummed me out. But then I realized that, given all the evidence in the science fiction entertainment world, robots will someday rule the universe and we puny humans will be a) batteries, b) pets, c) skeletons in the robot versions of natural history museums or d) sliced up and converted into robots ourselves (depending on your science fictional evidence of choice) this is actually quite good for me. The bots seem to think I'm interesting. Perhaps that means they'll keep me around for entertainment purposes.

On the off chance that any of you are real people, please feel free to do the Google Friend Connect thing over in the sidebar. My "legion" of devoted fans looks kinda lame with just one member. Especially since my legion of one is my husband, and I'm pretty sure he only clicked on it because it looked *really* lame as a legion of none.

Of course, now there's pressure to write something interesting in this space, what with 25 bots, a friend or two, perhaps a few random strangers, and my husband checking in on me.

I had several thoughts over the course of the day about what to blog about. I've read a bunch of books lately, some that I loved and some that I hated and even one that made me cry myself to sleep. (For the record, I'm not usually all that weepy.) I could have done a book review. But that seemed kind of a nerdy way to start out and while I freely admit I'm a nerdy girl, it didn't feel like the right beginning. Plus, I tend to overthink my book reviews and I didn't really have time for regular thinking today, let alone overthinking.

I intended to make Dutch apple squares for Rosh Hashana this week. I planned to bake them on Monday night, and that didn't happen. I planned to bake them on Tuesday night, and that didn't happen either. I planned to bake them this afternoon and thought that then I could blog about baking them, and that really didn't happen. No baking meant no blogging about baking.

I ended up getting pizza for dinner and adding apple wedges to the order. Fried takeout apple wedges that may or may not contain actual apples pretty much sums up how I suspect my "sweet new year" is going to play out, so it actually seems to have worked out.

Happy 5772, by the way.

I also considered blogging about my daughter. She's learned how to stick out her tongue. She sticks her tongue out at me. I stick my tongue out at her. She giggles like it's the funniest thing in the history of the world. I spent most of the day trying to get a picture, none of which came out, but it was fun nonetheless.

Alas, then she fought me at bedtime for an hour and a half before she finally fell asleep, screaming at the top of her lungs like I was torturing her whenever I left her alone and then beating the crap out of me when I went into the nursery to try to comfort her.

Between her screaming and me screaming, I'm surprised none of my new neighbors called the cops. Either I have really understanding neighbors or people screaming and crying for 90 straight minutes is business as usual around here. Not sure how I feel about that.

Needless to say, by the time I sat down at my computer, I didn't think she was all that cute anymore and was in no mood to blog about her.

And so I am left with nothing to blog about, except this rambling post about nothing and everything and I decided that would work. If nothing else, it gives you a pretty accurate snapshot of my day.

So, assuming you're not bots, or that you're bots capable of conversational interaction, I pose this question: who the heck are all of you people? What brought you here to my random new blog?

Come now, don't be shy. I spent my day sticking out my tongue at a one-year-old, agonizing over what to feed the blog bots next, and wondering why all the people of Pontypandy don't just lynch Norman Price already and get it over with.

Seriously, would a village that small need that many firemen if they didn't have a pint-sized arsonist running around?

Oh Look! Another Blog! How Original.

This is probably the 15th blog I've started in the ten years since I first discovered the concept of blogging. I love blogging. I'm an introvert, a writer, and I'm addicted to the internet, so blogging always seems like the optimal thing for me to waste my time doing.

The pattern goes something like this: I get an idea for the perfect blog for me, I spend a whole afternoon playing around with a blogger template, and I boldly blog away. For three or four weeks. Sometimes months. But over time, inevitably, I lose interest in writing about the topic I've chosen. Or I set an utterly ridiculous blogging schedule that I can't possibly keep up with and so ultimately abandon. Or I discover I'm not as witty as I thought I was when fumbling my way through whatever it is I'm supposed to be blogging about and get too discouraged to continue. Whatever the reason, the result is always the same: an abandoned blog floating out there in cyberspace, never to be seen or heard from again.

Except by the random Google bots that occasionally pop up on my hit counter.

So as I sit here and start this blog, you can understand why I'm not terribly optimistic that anything will come of it. I'm warning you from the outset: read at your own risk. It is entirely possible that I will get distracted by a shiny new idea and leave you hanging. Or I will become so boring and repetitive that you want to stab your computer every time a new post from me pops up in your RSS reader of choice. Or I will one day get so frustrated with myself that I delete the whole thing out of spite.

But I'm hoping to avoid all of that this time.

I'm trying something new with this blog. I'm not going to have a focus or a schedule or anything resembling a theme. I'm not going to have features or contests or regular guests. Or any kind of structure at all really. I'm going to write about whatever strikes my fancy, whenever I am inclined to do so.

I read a lot, so there will be many book reviews. There will probably be semi-regular cooking adventures because I try to cook at least one interesting new meal a week for my family and I have *issues* with recipes. Every now and then I write, and random snippets of fiction might show up here from time to time.  I'm also struggling with depression and social anxiety issues and I have a tendency to blurt out my introspective ramblings like the internet is my own personal group therapy session. I knit, very slowly and not very inventively; I may regale you with tales of frustrating knots and extraneous yarn overs. I have a one-year-old daughter I'm fairly certain I'll end up oversharing about, much to her future dismay.

Hopefully at least some of it will be entertaining.