Meaningless, obligatory post.

One year ago was my 200,000 hits meaningless obligatory post, so the site has doubled its hits in a year.

woo

I'm not one to write personal stories, but I think I have to lay this one out as one more example of how republican obstructionism on the issue of providing healthcare to Americans has failed everyone.

My wife and I have been together for over 7 years now, although we were just married this summer. She has a son, who is now almost 17 years old. Both of them have minor psychological issues, alleviated by a particular drug. Acquiring that drug is our nightmare.

The "Total Hits to the System" for this blog has reached 200,000. Hits include any loading of a page, so that includes my administration of the site as well as visitor hits.

I have actually been away from the blogs for awhile now, so the last two months have shown about 15,000 hits from readers alone.

I spent the first week in August in the Florida Keys for my birthday. My fiance, her son, and I flew into the Conch Republic and were received by my father and his wife. They had rented a beautiful house for the month.

Besides going on the best dives of my life on Looe Key, we caught several lobster, and 15-year-old Alex was able to scuba dive for his first time. Among other excitement, we saw some endangered key deer on the way to the No Name Pub.

A photo-journal of the trip is below.

This site has proudly reached 150,000 hits according to my site statistics page.

I recently finished reading Hillary Clinton's book It Takes a Village. It was originally written in 1995; I have the 10th anniversary edition. Given recent events, one passage stood out as relevent as I read it last night.

The exhaustive coverage of violence and bad news in general contributes to young people's increasing sense of alienation and to the dysfunctional, antisocial behavior that accompanies it. Many kids become depressed or have nightmares beacuse of the barrage of bloodshed they see on TV. It numbs them to the pain and destructiveness of actual violence, encouraging a stance of ironic detachment.

SmokeyMonkey.org nears 100,000 hits. As I have said in previous diaries such as this, "hits" is a function of the site statistics page.

Another small milestone, the site has now hit 75,000 according to site statistics. The big difference between the top ten list now versus then is the large increase in the number of views for Religious Society? (Redux) and the addition of 2006 Arizona Ballot Propositions, which received over 200 hits. Much of that seems to have come randomly from the internet, not from crossposting. As the election approached, the views went up. At least one person told me they had found it by googling.

Anyway, the trend (which I'm not tracking in any way other than looking at when I posted previous milestones), is about 3-4 months per 25,000 hits. With that in mind, I'll see you January for the big 100k.

I believe I have eliminated the scourge of porn spam from my website. It is nice to know that the website is receiving some attention, but that is not the attention I seek.

I would like to apologize to anyone that may have been offended by the lingering comments attached to very old stories that I haven't thought about in months. I finally realized that a search of all comments showed mostly porn links. My sincere apologies for missing that.

As a result I have implemented certain restrictions and changes. I detail these below.

Happy Birthday to me, one week late. Birthdays suck. I have no reason to celebrate another year of life.

Pessism aside, I had a terrific first week of my thirty-fourth year. I went away. Not far away. Just comfortably away. I didn't watch any news. I didn't visit any websites. I most especially didn't blog. My last post cut across the DailyKos.com grain. A poll from yesterday there showed a resounding support of Gabrielle Giffords.

But instead of thinking of that, or the never-ending middle east struggle, or civil war in Iraq, I took a four day weekend with my family to visit family in New Mexico. From one part of the desert to another, it was a peaceful journey.