First Robin sighting, March 14, 2016

It's not Spring yet, so I won't call it the First Robin of Spring.  Spotted around 5:50 PM on Monday, March 14, 2016 on the way home from work, on a fence on Front Street in the Hanover Section of Nanticoke.

250,000

Well, it's been an eventful few days. We had our first sizable snowstorm of this warm, snowless Winter - about six inches of fluffy powder in Nanticoke on Saturday morning. Saturday night I was told by a friend that Joe Paterno was close to death, and Sunday morning the announcement went out that he had died.

But that's not what I'm posting about. No, I'm posting about the fact that today, this happened:

250,000 visitors! Now, granted, a bunch of those visits are from the googlebot. And more than a few are by me, before I figured out how to ignore my own visits. But I also didn't have a SiteMeter counting for the first month or so, so it balances out, maybe!

So, congratulations, Unknown visitor from an Unknown Organization in an Unknown Country! I hope somewhere in the two pages you visited during your 46-second visit, you found the information on classifications of species comic strip that you were looking for!

And a big thank you to everyone else who has visited since I started this blog way back in May of 2004! Every one of you has gone to making up the 250,000 visitors! Except those who visited before I had the SiteMeter up. And those who visited when I had to take the SiteMeter down for a few days because it was making the Internet crash. But the rest of you, you are the true heroes!

333333

333,333 official miles on my 1996 Toyota Tercel, registered around 11:50 last night while driving through Wilkes-Barre. Unofficially, there are about 2000 additional miles on it from when the speedometer cable rotted away and my miles weren't registering.

Original engine. Has had the brakes, spark plugs, windshield wiper blades, tires, and headlight bulbs replaced numerous times. Front axles and third brake light bulb replaced once. Exhaust system replaced - groan - three times, and each time I felt like I was getting ripped off.

Onward to 400,000!

200,000

On Monday, November 22, 2010, at approximately 1:51 AM, Another Monkey received its 200,000th counted visitor.

Now, some caveats:  I did not place a counter on my site until several weeks after I had started it.  (This probably resulted in an undercount of half a dozen people or so.)  Also, it took me a while to figure out how to not count my own visits.  Additionally, more than a few of these counted visitors are actually visits from the GoogleBot, the friendly bot who stops by to see what you've posted and how it should be indexed for searches.  And there have been a few periods where I had to turn off the counter, or where it stopped working altogether - most notably the "Sitemeter Crashes the Internet" incident of August 2008.

Another Monkey was created on May 14, 2005.  I installed my SiteMeter a few weeks later.  I reached 15,000 visits on June 20, 2006, 20,000 visits on September 12, 2006, 30,000 visits on February 15, 2007, 75,000 visits on February 17, 2008, 100,000 visits on August 26, 2008, and 150,000 on October 19, 2009.

To visitor #200,000, who came from somewhere in Texas (allegedly Austin) to look at my latest post on the Sideshow Gathering, and to every single visitor who has stopped by before and since, I say:  thank you.  You make this all worthwhile.  Without you, I would just be talking to myself!

150,000

Yesterday afternoon, Another Monkey was visited by visitor #150,000.

Whether you are a regular reader or were referred here by a search engine, all are welcome! Remember, without you, I'd just be sitting here talking to myself!

Two thousand and some

I realized the other day that I had published my two thousandth blog post some time ago. But which post was it? According to my Blogger Dashboard, "Masterpiece" was published post #2024. So, going to my list of published posts and counting backwards - and then forwards, and then backwards again, because I was up all night and am very tired and am having a hard time with sophisticated mental tasks like "counting"* - I determined that post #2000 was "Another Monkey as a Cloud." Odd that this milestone post should actually be a post about my own blog!

And yet it moves. To infinity, and beyond!


*For a while I thought this was post 2000. Turns out it's actually post 2001. Or 1999. Something.

300,000

On my commute home from work today, just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, my 1996 four-door Toyota Tercel DX hit 300,000 miles. I pulled over on an offramp on the Central Scranton Expressway to record the event.

It should come as a surprise to no one that, three miles later, my CHECK ENGINE light came on.*

I had no intention of keeping my car this long - well, not up until the events of nearly two years ago. I had planned on getting a new car after about the 250,000 mile mark, or when cars become sufficiently advanced for me to consider selecting a replacement for my sturdy, reliable, efficient (40+ mpg in the Summer) Tercel. Other cars aren't there yet, and at this time I can't afford to add a car payment to my monthly list of bills. Maybe someday.

Until then, I'll keep on driving my Tercel. Next stop: 350,000 miles!



*Really, it's probably just a milestone setpoint - though I don't remember if I had the light come on at 100,000 or 200,000 miles. But there are a few things I should have taken care of soon anyway. On Thursday I'll check everything I can check myself, especially the coolant/antifreeze level - that has set the CHECK ENGINE light off before.

Almost 300,000

I looked at my odometer yesterday and saw that it is at about 299,760 miles. I'll be hitting 300,000 this week!, I thought. And then my heart sank a little: I put 66 miles on my car each day during my commute. At that rate, I would hit the 300k milestone sometime during the commute, and it would be virtually impossible to get a photo of the event, like I did for 234,567 and 250,000 miles, unless I was on my way home and was able to detour somewhere off the highway.

I added drygas to my fuel this week, the good isopropyl stuff. I also replaced my windshield wiper blades recently, and checked my coolant level. I thought I was ready for whatever Winter could hand me.

This morning my car decided that I could not release my emergency brake.

Let me make this clear: My emergency brake is released. I know what it feels like when I'm driving with it on, and this ain't it. I think. I'm pretty sure.

But the BRAKE light won't go off on my dashboard, and the brake lights on the back of my car stay lit.

I wasn't about to drive my car 66 miles in that state. If nothing else, the computer at least might become convinced that I am driving with the emergency brake on, and might do something rash. Luckily there was a backup plan in place in the event that I could not take my own car to work. Luckily also, I gassed up my mom's car yesterday and added drygas to the fuel.

When I got back from work today I checked to see if the slightly warmer daytime temperatures might have undone whatever has put my car in this state. Nothin' doing.

I don't think this is really a brake issue. I think the brake is fully disengaged. I think this is a sensor issue, or something like the issue which prevented my speedometer/odometer cable from sending signals just about a year ago. (In reality, I probably have 302,000 miles on my car already, but my odometer was non-functional for most of last January.) I would very much like this problem to go away on its own. But if it's anything like last year's problem, it will only go away with the assistance of rather a lot of money.

Until it does go away, my car will be offline.

Ironic footnote: Looks like we're shut down for the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday. So my total work commute for this rotation would be 198 miles, not 264 miles. If I had driven my car to work every day this rotation, I would still have some miles to go before I hit 300,000. As things stand now...who knows?

100,000

We interrupt the rapid descent into the morass of politics to note this milestone:

Another Monkey has had its hundred thousandth visitor!

Now, granted, a few dozen of these visits are from me, all those times I couldn't figure out how to keep my own visits from registering. But at the same time it should be noted that there have been a few SiteMeter malfunctions - including the infamous August 1 incident, which forced many users to temporarily remove their SiteMeters. So this count is probably pretty close to the truth.

And visitor 100,000 came from Little Rock, Arkansas at 10:32 tonight searching for an answer to the question "what time can i see the 2 moons", a reference to the "Two Moons on August 27" misinformation that has made the rounds every year since the actual incident in 2003. (I don't call this a "hoax" for reasons that I explain here.) And it pleases me very much that visitor 100,000 left by way of a link to this page from NASA that explains the "two moons" issue very clearly. Somebody left my site knowing something they didn't know when they came here. That really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

And it also makes me happy just for having visitors! Thanks, everybody! Now, onward to one million!

We now return you to your previously scheduled political bickering, already in progress.

Birds, Bt, and another milestone

This weekend has been OK. Finished mowing the lawn yesterday. Hauled out some compost, and put a bag of leaves into the composter. This was one of about six bags of the leaves I raked up last December 12. I bagged them and then discreetly used the bags to insulate the cat shelters that are dotted around our property. As Spring turns into Summer, this insulation is no longer really necessary, and there will be plenty more next Autumn.

I also refilled the bird feeders for the first time this year. I'll have to make this seed last, because I can't afford to buy sack after sack for the winged gluttons. If only the cats would eat the birds, we'd really be able to cut back on the costs of feeding the animals in our backyard ecosystem.

Today I took a drive out to the Dallas Agway to buy Bt. I think the girl working the cash register had a better idea of how Bt works than the clerk working the floor did. (Bt is a bacterium that needs to be ingested and is poisonous to caterpillars. You spray it on the leaves that they eat and after they eat enough of it, they die. It is not a contact poison, and simply soaking a paper tree wrap with it will not be effective.) I also bought a fabric tree wrap and some sticky goo. This will go around the tree trunks and catch the little bastards as they head for the leaves. It will also be effective against Gypsy Moth caterpillars in a few weeks.

I needed a new hose-end sprayer to apply this stuff to my trees, and my neighbors' trees. Agway had several models for $12 - $15. Kmart had one for over $10, and another one for $8 that came pre-filled with some Miracle-Gro product. (I don't use that stuff.) The new Ace Hardware by my house had them for under $5.

My car hit the 288,000 mile mark as I pulled into the Ace parking lot. These are "official" miles - I was driving without a functioning odometer for most of January. I wonder how much longer I can keep it going?

75,000

I received my 75,000th visitor sometime early Sunday morning. I might have been online then, but I forgot to check my SiteMeter. Thank you, whoever you were, and thank you to the other 75,202 visitors who have stopped by as of this writing!

It should be noted that it's been a little more than a year since I received my 30,000th visitor!

10

On July 7, 2007 I donated my eightieth pint of blood.

I first started donating back in 1992. There was a blood drive going on in Nanticoke, at the Armory downtown. I was still kicking around trying to find myself a job, hoping that the one I had applied for with a Compact Disc manufacturer thirty-five miles away might work out, and giving blood seemed like a good thing to do while I was waiting. Besides, I had recently picked up a book on historical fads, and one of the more interesting ones was bloodletting - attempting to increase the lifespan of men to match that of women by imitating the periodic blood loss experienced by most females, and I thought it would be amusing to see if there was any value in it. Better health through blood loss! Unlike the bloodletting fads of old, my blood donations would actually get to help some people.

Donors were laid out on hard, flat cots. The donation lasted about an hour and left me with a huge bruise on my arm. I wasn't sure I would do it again.

I think I gave blood one more time, in the basement of a local Catholic school, before I started making arrangements for semi-regular donations at the local Red Cross Donor Center. Donations became a sort of a game: how many donations could I squeeze into a single year? (You can give blood every eight weeks, so if you time donations right you can actually give seven times a year, though you would only be able to give six times the following year.)

I haven't always succeeded. At least one donation went awry, with the needle missing my vein (or passing through it entirely), resulting in an incomplete pint that could not be used and a huge bruise under my skin. Other times I have been deferred for Iron levels that were too low. Sometimes I couldn't donate because of scheduling conflicts, or because I was out of the country when the date rolled around.

More people need to donate. For many people, the first and last times they donated was in the days following September 11, 2001. First, because many people had an automatic response to want to do something meaningful in response to the attacks, and donating blood seemed like the most appropriate and helpful thing; last, because many people became enraged when they discovered that their donations had been discarded after a certain period of time, and vowed never to donate again. (Blood and blood products have a finite shelf life, and the glut of donations in response to an incident that really did not call for blood donations meant that, briefly, much more blood and blood products were available than could be used before their shelf life expired.)

Over the last fifteen years I have donated eighty pints of blood. That's ten gallons of the red stuff, as the pin I recently received will attest. On Wednesday, if my Iron levels are sufficient, I will begin working on the next ten. I would be very happy if you decided to start working on your ten gallon pin.

8/10

For the moment, http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/ has a Google PageRank of 8/10.

I think this is related to the recent avalanche of hits I've been getting lately. Up until a few weeks ago, my typical daily number of visitors was 70 - 100. Starting a few weeks ago - when I wrote a certain post I've mentioned previously - my daily visits shot up to 200 - 300 each day.

Yesterday I had 1,718 visitors. That's 3.1% of the total visitors I've ever received.

In the past seven days I've had 4,256 visitors, accounting for 7.7% of my total visitors, and in the month of August I've had 7,883 visitors, accounting for 14.3% of my total.

It would be foolish to imagine that this level of traffic will continue, or that I will remain at a PageRank of 8/10. Still, I hope some fraction of these new visitors will become regular readers. If you are one of them, welcome! Please have a look around and let me know what you think of the place!

UPDATE, a few minutes later: Now it's back down to the regular PageRank of 4/10. Perhaps the new post diluted the rankings. Oh well.

50,000

Sometime today I had my 50,000th visitor. Who it was, exactly, I cannot say - by the time I checked the SiteMeter it was at 50,102, with 141 visitors so far for the day. Unfortunately, SiteMeter only retains rudimentary information on the last 100 visitors to the site, so the information that would have allowed me to take a guess at the visitor's identity has been lost.

So, this goes out to every last one of you, whether you're a regular reader or a first time visitor, whether you've known me for decades or have only come here because you were searching for "two moons on august 27" or "js3250.dll" or "cathy baker hee haw": THANK YOU! Thank you for visiting, thank you for reading. Without you I'd just be sitting here talking to myself on this site. And how crazy would THAT be?

Tomorrow is the last day of my second rotation. I need to go to bed soon. I'll write lots more on my four days off, I promise!

30,000

I received my 30,000th visitor today at 7:07:41 PM. I don't know who it is, but the IP address (75.75.157.###) looks familiar. They came by way of Gort's site.

Thanks for visiting, everybody! If it weren't for you, I'd be talking to myself!

20,000

Sometime yesterday afternoon I received my 20,000th visitor since I set up my SiteMeter in late May 2004. I had my 15,000th visitor on June 20, 2006. It took more than 24 months to get 15,000 visitors, and less than 3 more months to get the next 5,000!

My deepest gratitude to every visitor here. I will continue to try to post something interesting, amusing, or insightful for your reading pleasure as often as possible. But remember, I'm just another monkey with a typewriter who isn't quite banging out Shakespeare yet. Be sure to visit the good folks in the Blog Links on my sidebar - they're the people whose blogs I read when I'm fixin' to read me some blogs!

30,000 page views

Thursday morning I checked my Sitemeter and saw this:

30,000 page views as of 8/10/006

30,000 page views! It's been less than seven weeks since I was at 25,000.

I owe a lot of this to The Anomalist, and to Cathy Baker of Hee Haw fame, and to When Fangirls Attack! It's nice to know that so many people are reading - or at least looking at - my stuff.

Another milestone

Today I had my 25,000th page view since I began counting in May of 2004. For some people, for some sites, that's nothing. For me, it's mind-boggling.

Thank you all for visiting. I hope I make it worth your while.

15,000

I just got the 15,000th visit to my site. Granted, this number is a little bit off, since I was rsponsible for a couple dozen self-hits before I figured out how to keep my Sitemeter from counting my own visits.

The odd thing is, I know who this person is - or suspect I know who they are, based on their domain name. As a prize for being the 15,000th visitor, this person (and his family!) wins a weekend of hard labor at my new house - lugging books, painting stuff, shaking their heads in disbelief at the amount of work that needs to be done! CONGRATULATIONS!

250,000

As expected, my 1996 Toyota Tercel hit 250,000 miles right around the end of the year. It happened today while I was on a winding, narrow part of Route 11 with a mountain on my right, the Susquehanna on my left, a blind curve behind me, and Shickshinny a mile ahead of me. (Notice the green arrows indicating that my hazard lights are flashing. Safety first!)

I didn't take the advice of a friend who suggested that, wherever and whenever the car hit 250,000 miles, I should simply pull over, turn the car off, leave the keys in the ignition, and just walk away. It would have been pretty funny, though.

And it seems like just yesterday that I hit 234,567 miles. In fact, it was eight months and one week ago.