We’ve been at this blog for a while now – writing it and reading it – and by now some things have become rather predictable. Around the time of a new secular year I’ll come to the blog and write a post. I’ll ruminate on the past year and speculate upon the next year. I’ll continue to blog on a regular schedule, which after a while will switch to irregular and then to sporadic. (If you’re lucky.) Back in the early years (when I didn’t have a day job) and in some of the more recent years (whenever I came up with a strong theme for the year’s posts) I wrote regularly or effusively. But no matter how the year ended, whether with a bang or with a whimper, I’d come back to the blog again on New Year’s Day and re-initiate the cycle.
One of the things that charms me about coming back to the blog is what I see in the Site Statistics when I return. Usually I see that, on average, a few people have stopped by a few times a week, throughout the year, to see if there’s anything new. (If you’re one of these people, you should just Follow me or the blog. I think you’ll get some sort of notification when I publish a new post, and you can save yourself some trouble.) Now, realistically, this low-level perpetual traffic is probably not coming from real people like you and me. It’s probably mostly bots, or spiders, of electronic what-have-you. But I do like to think that at least a couple of the visits come from my cyber friends who miss Chocolate Sheep and would like to see a new blog post. (If you’re one of these people, you should comment to that effect on the most recent post. I think that I’ll get some sort of notification when you comment, and that might encourage me to do more blogging.)
But sometimes I look at the Site Statistics and don’t know what the heck happened. A few years ago I was writing at another of my myriad blogs, Beth’s Bagels. Nobody knew about it and I wasn’t publicizing it. All of a sudden the traffic spiked tremendously and I couldn’t figure out why. It turned out that a recipe I had baked (without a great amount of success) for gluten-free bagels at Passover had been shared on Reddit. As far as I could tell some whole subreddit had come over to take a look at it, and then left forever. How fleeting is fame.
This year I noticed a brief spike on Chocolate Sheep, and I’ll need your help to figure out why it happened. I hadn’t posted anything since March, or May, or whenever, but around November 22 – well, take a look for yourself.
Here are the non-clues: I hadn’t posted anything, most of what was viewed was my “about the author” page, and I have no data to indicate that an outside site (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) referred anyone to my page. But apparently a lot of people stopped by my house while I was away, and I can’t help but wonder what they were looking for. The influx began three weeks before the week I have highlighted above, and by the end of November most of my visitors (but not all) seem to have wandered away. Any ideas? Put your thoughts in the comments and let’s play a little Sherlock Holmes.
Knitwise, I haven’t really been doing much knitting. Last year was a really slow year for it. Early in the pandemic a friend asked me to knit a very special item for his wife, and I was thrilled to be asked to do so. They provided all of the yarn as well as the pattern, and about three rows into the pattern everything came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t follow the pattern, and I didn’t understand the technique. I consulted more experienced knitters, I watched the tutorial video, I tried again. It was a hopeless mess. To cap it off, all the colors of the yarn were not only similar, but dark – and I didn’t have much available morning time in good light. Finally I set aside an afternoon (seated next to a bright lamp) in which I tried to get to the heart of the problem. That’s when I realized that not only was I trying to learn a difficult technique, I was trying to learn a specialized variation in which the pattern designer added a little something extra to make the pattern reversible. That made me feel better. But it also made me realize that I would need to rip the project out again, cast on for it again, and use a technique that I might actually be able to learn. I haven’t been blessed with a lot of free time in the morning with good light, either, so everything is still sitting in the project bag waiting for a miracle to happen. I really do want to finish the project, especially since this would be my (already somewhat belated) wedding present to the happy couple. I’d like that to happen before they decide not to be friends with me any more.
I have been doing some very simple knitting in the last month or so. I had a garter-stitch scarf at hand for working on during Webex conference meetings, when nobody could see what I was doing. This morning I sewed in the ends of five dishcloths that I had knitted up some time ago – maybe over the summer? Last spring? And at the end of November I seamed, washed, and blocked a simple shawl that I had knitted a year ago, finishing it in time to give it to a December graduate.
Now I’m combining two partial balls of yarn – one with its ball band, the other a complete mystery – into a striped scarf that I’m making as a gift for a May graduate. I can’t knit on it when I’m reading, but I can get several rows done while I’m listening to podcasts or watching movies. It’s extremely simple, but would you like to see a picture?
I’ve also been trying to do more writing. I designed a writing retreat for myself in November (to make up for my inability [due to finances and the freaking pandemic] to spend a weekend holed up in a cabin somewhere), and I’ve been pretty good since then about journaling, doing reading research for a long fiction project, and doing writing connected with the planning of that project. Today I finished the first of several books that I’m reading as research, and after I publish this post I’ll get started on the next one.
Back to the books!
Chocolate Sheep 