photos of exclamation points

I happened to look at the search terms people used to find my blog today, and saw that someone had come seeking “exclamation point photos.” I found this rather surprising. Perplexing, even. For one thing, I haven’t posted (or hadn’t yet posted), to my knowledge, any actual photographs of exclamation points. (I did once compose and post a rather nice graphic of an exclamation point made of punctuation marks, but it’s not a photo.)

For another thing, I was surprised that someone out there would actually be looking for “exclamation point photos.” That is, someone out there who is not me. As it happens, I have found myself noticing exclamation points in the wild for the past several years. They are elusive and rare creatures, but happily, once spotted, they tend not to run away. Many of them will even consent to having their photos taken.

First, my earliest wild exclamation point sighting. This little guy was seen at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in March of 2009.

It seemed to be made out of green tea, which is common for wild punctuation marks in the area. Sadly, shortly after this photo was taken, the little exclamation point was squished and smeared across the table by the fingers of a curious nearby preschooler.

This rather startled looking specimen was seen on the ceiling tiles in a lab at MIT. I think it was trying to run away. (Spotted March, 2011.)

This cute little guy was on some steps of the Great Wall of China, near Mutianyu. It posed for me in May, 2012.

And most recently, this timid creature was seen at a zoo in Massachusetts in August, 2012. It was trying to hide under a few leaves, possibly out of concern that it would be stomped on. (And it may have had some reason for concern, as I believe that the feet in the photo belong to the same individual who smushed the green tea exclamation point of the first 2 photos back in 2009.)

As you can see, my blog will now be THE go-to place for photos of exclamation points. Perhaps one day I will write a guide book on the subject.

the longest shortest month

Even for those of us who love a bit of winter, the season can get a bit old come February. The cold, the gray, the cold, the gray. The snow, the slush, the ice. Gray skies. Bare trees. Cold hands. The bright lights and festivities of the winter holidays seem like ages in the past, and spring remains stubbornly out of reach. February may be the shortest month, but it certainly feels like a long one where I live.

It was a packed month for me, too, and it’s hard to believe how much happened: concert, blizzard, visit from my mother, school vacation. A birthday for one child, and kindergarten registration for the other. I posted every day of the month, and I reached my thousandth post. I posted a lot of photos, and worked through some nervous energy. (But I still didn’t manage to post a bunch of the things I’ve had in mind to post. Will I ever?)

And here is one last photo for the month. For Annette, who finds herself taking too many photos of bare trees. (Though they are lovely bare tree photos.) Look! I got you another photo of bare trees. And for Sarah, whose words about the many grays of February brought a bit of light into the end of my month. (You see? This photo only looks slightly different in black and white.)

There are subtle hints of muddy brown and the barest hint of bluishness in the sky and snow. But mostly we have black and white and gray. No need for the box of 64 crayons to color this scene.

And here we are with the that last bit of color drained out.

a post in a thousand

Here is a list of a thousand things:

• one in a thousand
• a picture is worth a thousand words
• $1000 bill (featuring Grover Cleveland)
• a grand
• thousand island dressing
• batting a thousand
• No, no, a thousand times no!
• Thouands Cheer
• a thousand points of light
• The Night Has A Thousand Eyes
• thousand paper cranes
• thousand yard stare
• thousand-year-old egg
• millefiori
• mille-feuille
• millenium
• millipede
• 10³
• the square root of a million
• kilo- (kilometer, kilogram, etc.)
• K (short for kilo)
• M (in Roman numerals)

I know, I know. This list is not 1000 things long. But they are thousand things. Because this is my one thousandth post on this blog. (Also, the word “thousandth” is really hard to say.)

image credits: millefiori bead from Fire Mountain Gems, mille-feuille by okki, paper cranes by James..g, the M in stone photo is my own, taken in Barcelona. The thousand dollar bill is not mine, nor did I take it.

barely balanced

I liked the way that these tall piles of snow managed to stay upright, nestled in the branches of this tree in our front yard. In the afternoon light, it even had a bit of a glow.

This photo was from Sunday. Now, remarkably, much of the snow is gone. We had a warm stretch, and lots of rain, melting and compacting the 2 feet of snow from Saturday down to maybe 4 inches. I thought that much snow would stick around for weeks! 2 years ago, we had a winter where the snow just kept coming, without the melting in between. There were a number of roof cave-ins around the area from the weight of all that snow. I like the quick melting snow much better!

Speaking of balance, I’m having a bit of trouble getting all the things done I need to do. It’s been another crazy stretch, with all kinds of commitments left and right. Valentine’s Day stuff for the kids. Work stuff. Home stuff. I have an early meeting in Boston tomorrow, and then I will collect my mother at the airport. The house is a mess, and I still haven’t found the guest bed. And I really, really want to share a story about a Big Thing I did last week. But I need to go to bed!

I also feel compelled to say that now that I’ve publicly announced my intentions to post every day this month, it suddenly feels like more of a burden to post every day this month. I know that’s sort of silly, especially given that I don’t actually *have* to post every day this month. And I certainly don’t need to do anything spectacular when I post every day this month. But now I have this strange compulsion to repeat the phrase “post every day this month.”

Did I mention that I need to get to bed?

digging in

Our array of snow shovels.

Some of you may have noticed that I have been posting rather frequently of late. I decided, you see, that I would post every day this month. I have so many photos and stories to share, I decided to just dig in. I don’t really have a plan, beyond that. I’m just picking from among the photos in my digital hoard, or posting as things come up. I hope to share some more of my travel stories, and other posts I’ve started to draft. Maybe, when I’ve laid it all out, some sort of pattern will emerge. Or maybe it will be just a big pile. But it will be my pile.

There are some bushes hiding under these piles.

Our front path.

And now I should try to dig back into my work, which has been entirely neglected for the past few days. Not only have I spent a lot of time shovelling snow, but I have also not had any time without at least one young child since Thursday.

Dude, where’s my doodle?

Back in September, my blog rolled over the 1 million pageviews mark. In anticipation of this event, I had given people the opportunity to guess the date of the upcoming rollover, and offered these fabulous non-cash prizes:¹

Guess the day (and a time, too, if you like) that my blog will hit 1,000,000 pageviews. Whoever gets closest will win a choice of one of the following:

• An original crayon doodle in the style of my blog header created by me
• An original haiku created by me
• An original dust bunny created by my extraordinarily subpar housekeeping skills
• A walk-in appearance in my next novel. (I’ve never written a novel. But I might some day, and you’d totally get to be in it.)
• A walk-in appearance in my dissertation, should I ever actually write one. (Expect delayed gratification. Very delayed.²)
• A post here on the topic of your choosing
• A surprise, chosen by me³

Maria, aka Madame Meow of A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm!, picked the actual date of the rollover, and I therefore declared her to be the winner. She chose the doodle prize, which felt like as much of a prize for me. A reason to doodle! I immediately put “doodle for Maria” on my to-do list.

Here it is, over 4 months later, and I have yet to mail Maria her doodle. I had a little bit of a sense of déjà vu. I had a little bit of a sense of déjà vu. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) You see, I had a drawing back in 2008 for some chocolate I’d brought back from Brazil, and Maria was by chance the winner that time, and I was “slow” to follow through.⁴ It’s funny how back in June of 2008, I felt like I was being slow by waiting a week or 2.⁵ Here we are over 4 years later, and I am barely embarrassed to be running 4+ months late.

In any case, I did doodle for Maria. Over a month ago, even. I used some of the difficult-to-work-due-to-no-childcare time down at my in-laws’ for Thanksgiving. (I also used only the crayons that were available there, which were a bit of a mixed bag. The black that I used for my outline was a little stub of a thing, and a few were really waxy, poor-quality ones. But mostly it was fun to work within the constraints. Plus it was fun to draw with the kids, both of whom were inspired by my doodles. (Maybe later I will share their versions.))

So, here is your doodle, Maria. I photographed it in stages (against the background my mother-in-law’s tablecloth), which can be viewed in the slideshow below. At some point, I will mail you the paper version. But first I will have to find it.

Because I don’t remember what I did with it after I packed it up to bring home after Thanksgiving.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

¹ Note that the footnotes in the quote below are from the quoted post.
² See footnote 1.
³ Hi.
⁴ Note that my post title for that post was, “Dude, where’s my chocolate?“
⁵ Note that back in June of 2008, I as yet had only one child (not counting the bun that was in the oven).

I actually miss posting every day.

30 posts had November. NaBloPoMo came and went this year, and I hardly whined about posting at all. Well, there was that brief bit in the middle. And maybe I’m forgetting some whining. Mostly, though, it felt like the posts flowed.

I posted a lot of photos, both old and new, thanks in part to participating in friday foto finder. (I do love me a theme.) I got on a roll with the tomatoes, and had quicker flings with baskets and doors. (I do love me a theme.) Fall offered up a host of pretty leaves to share, and even some snow. I celebrated the 6th birthday of my blog with pants, which are always a comfy fit. I had some things to say relating to the US election, and to the Sandy recovery efforts.

I didn’t even come close to running out of things to say. I even had 2 nearly complete Themed Things Thursday posts that weren’t quite finished enough on the Thursdays for which I’d intended them, and they join the 43 other unfinished ThThTh posts that I’ve poked at now and again. (Those things take a long time to get together, what with the links and the images and the formatting and the commentary. I can whip off a list of things in a few minutes, but without the fleshing out, they aren’t as satisfying to me. But I do love me a theme)

And there are still a number of posts that have been brewing in my head for months, years even, that I’d expected to get around to. Hopefully I still will. (Plus there are all those various promissory notes I’ve left around the internets: things I said I’d post, or write more about, etc. Anyone want to call me on any of those? I respond well to external stimuli…)

This is all to say that I enjoyed the daily blogging, so I was glad I did NaBloPoMo. On the flip side, I had trouble keeping up with the blog reading, even with my much-diminished blogroll, but I’m still planning to catch up.

These are butterflies that Theo and I made one morning when Phoebe was at karate. Theo made his first, and then instructed me to make a bigger mommy butterfly using the same colors and patterns. I didn’t have any particular reason for choosing this photo for this post. Or maybe there were several vague reasons. I’m feeling rather wistful this evening, as today would have been my father’s 91st birthday. Butterflies, for me, symbolize both the ephemerality and continuity of life, especially these, given that they represent 2 generations. And Theo himself is part of that continuity. Also, we’ve had a plethora of lepidoptera, in the form of a weirdly unseasonal profusion of moths around our neighborhood. The laptop symbolizes my laptop, which is now atop my lap. It is also the means by which I post things.

roll-over over

At some point between the hours of about 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., my blog reached 1,000,000 page views. By the time I went to bed, it was only about 50 hits away. I was sorely tempted to log out and visit my blog a few dozen times to push things along so I could witness the roll-over before going to sleep, but that just didn’t seem right. While there might have been a time in my life when I would have stayed up to watch it happen organically, this is not that time of my life. I went to bed. I awoke to the sound of the thumping of small children running around the house around quarter to 8. I reached for my iPad, and saw that the count was above a million. The roll-over was over. So I rolled over myself, and went back to sleep for a bit more. So much for fanfare. (Before 8 in the morning, I will invariably choose sleep over fanfare.)

I don’t remember the exact count at 7:45 this morning, but I think it was something around 1,000,016. So the roll-over probably happened around 6:30 or 7 in the morning, on Sunday, September 16th. So, Maria, your guess of the dieciseis was closest! (A few hours early, but it was around 16:00 somewhere in the world.) So, what fine prize will you choose?

A screenshot taken some time before I went to bed.


A screenshot taken some time after I got out of bed (and fed the kids breakfast and whatnot¹).

–
¹ I regularly feed the kids whatnot.

Thanks a million. Almost.

Before I got my beloved Mini¹, I used to drive a Toyota Corolla. We bought it used, but only slightly used. It had only about 35,000 miles on it, and was only a couple of years old. It was a great car. Almost totally unremarkable, with its 4 doors and gray-blue paint, you’d see cars just like it every day. It was barebones: no bells or whistles (it did have a horn), nondescript upholstery, casette player, manual roll-up windows. But that car got really amazing mileage. Typically 36 miles to the gallon. It was very reliable, not counting a couple of incidents with dud alternators. I loved that car.

I remember the day it rolled over to 100,000 miles. Well, I remember noting at some point that it was going to do so that day, and then later that day noticing that it had. I missed the actual moment of rollover. Probably because I was driving.

Would you believe that this blog is getting quite close to rolling over on the odometer? At some point soon, almost certainly this month, it will break a million pageviews. Quite remarkable for a little not-quite-six-year-old blog with a fairly small number of regular readers.

I’m hoping to catch the roll-over, and I wondered if anyone out there wanted to play a game with me to guess what day. As of right now, at 9:46 p.m. on Monday, September 3rd, the pageviews are at 994,985. (You can check what they are yourself, as I have the pageviews in my sidebar. Just scroll down a bit to see the section called “blog stats.” Unless you are reading this on a mobile version, in which case, I don’t know if you can see it.)

To help you estimate how quickly the roll-over will come, here are some details about my pageviews:

• I tend to get between 200 and 400 pageviews a day (mind you, these are WordPress pageviews, not unique visitors. So if someone clicks on a few pages, it counts as a few pageviews)
• An average weekday gets typically somewhere over 300, and weekends tend to be lower

Here are some screenshots of my blog stats from a few days ago. (I noticed that my pageviews were at 993,333, and I liked that number)

Pageviews by day:

Pageviews by week:

Pageviews by month:

(As you can see, things have slowed down in the last couple of years. This is probably partly due to people reading blogs less, but also because Google doesn’t seem to like me as much anymore. Maybe because I stopped sending it flowers?)

I did a lazy calculation, and estimating that I’ll continue to get around 300 pageviews a day, the remaining 5000 or pageviews should take a bit over 16 days. So that would put us around September 20th. I’m going to guess noon on September 20th for the rollover.

So, does anyone else want to play? Guess the day (and a time, too, if you like) that my blog will hit 1,000,000 pageviews. Whoever gets closest will win a choice of one of the following:

• An original crayon doodle in the style of my blog header created by me
• An original haiku created by me
• An original dust bunny created by my extraordinarily subpar housekeeping skills
• A walk-in appearance in my next novel. (I’ve never written a novel. But I might some day, and you’d totally get to be in it.)
• A walk-in appearance in my dissertation, should I ever actually write one. (Expect delayed gratification. Very delayed.²)
• A post here on the topic of your choosing
• A surprise, chosen by me³

—
¹ Did I ever mention that I had a Mini Cooper? Before I had a baby, I called it my baby.
² Very, very delayed.
³ Really I have no idea what this would be, so I would get to be surprised, too.⁴
⁴ It will almost definitely not be one million dollars. But I was really tempted to write that in as a prize, because I hear it in my head now, as spoken by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.