Passing 1200 Posts

This one sneaked by me.

I just happened to see on Blogspot that today's post will be the 1202nd I've published since I began DawnReader back on January 6, 2012 (link to that original post).

How can this be?

Like so many other things in my accelerating life, numbers of blog posts pile up without even my dimmest awareness. I wrote here not long ago that I retired from public school teaching more than eighteen years ago--the same number of years that would take you, say, from birth to your freshman year in college. I wrote on Tuesday this week that in August this year my sourdough starter will be twenty-nine years old--but didn't I buy it just last week? And twenty-nine years?!!? When I turned 29, our son was barely a year old. He will turn 43 this summer. He has sons who are six and ten.

This is wonderfully horrifying.

As is my wont, I just checked the total number of "hits" that DawnReader has received: 227,068. (I check only after each 100 posts.) Dividing that by 1201 (no one, of course, has yet "hit" today's post), I see that I've had an average of about 189 hits/post. Not bad (though puny--nay, invisible--by Major Blogger standards). On most days it's far fewer than 189. It's only when I write something controversial (not very often) and/or naughty (even less often) that the numbers increase dramatically. So it goes. But I write principally for my own entertainment--and for Joyce's--and if other folks like to check it out now and then, well, that's good, too.

I guess I'm surprised that I haven't run out of things to say ... then again, maybe I have and I'm just endlessly recycling. Whatever ... I still find that when I sit down each day to do this, I don't have to strain for a topic (maybe I should strain a little more?).

Stuff just keeps happening. I've read a book; I've seen a film; Joyce and I have gone somewhere interesting; I remember something; I feel or think something. I see something ...

This morning, for example, sitting here early, I saw a confused doe standing across the street. (We've lived here nearly eighteen years, and I've seen deer in the neighborhood only rarely--munching, for example, the blossoms on our day lilies.)

I headed off to grab my smart phone (it was quielty charging in another room) and slipped out the front door to take a picture. But the doe heard me (no Pathfinder or Deerslayer, I) and started to trot; I snapped off a blurry image (see below), and, of course, it got me imagining what a doe must think when she sees 30 Church Street, Hudson, Ohio--what she must think when she sees a grizzled creature out on the front porch holding up near his (her? does it matter?) face a little black device that makes a soft clicking sound--what she must think as she's trotting east, looking for woods, for quiet, for safety, and wondering what on earth the world has come to.

So ... this is Post #1202. And off we go toward #1300 ...