10K - Hooray!!

OK, now I'm cheered up from this morning's JIB-rage. A few minutes ago, this blog had its - ta-daaah! - 10,000th visitor. It took just under 6-1/2 months, since I first enabled sitemeter five days after starting the blog, to reach this milestone.

As far back as I can remember, I have always loved numbers. Kids like me made the math-anxiety types cringe. My dad taught me basic algebra when I was about five - not that I understood it completely, but it was a start! I did logic puzzles for fun. My new passion - though I rarely have time for it - is Sudoku.

But my earliest memory of digital devotion relates to something very much akin to the blog sitemeter; namely, car odometers. My dad first pointed out the "changing car numbers" to me when I was four; in fact, on the very day that my brother was born. That same day, my dad's car odometer reached 10,000 miles. (I won't say which event was more significant to me at the time!)

For many years afterwards I used to look forward to being in the car for a "thousands number change" and especially for the really rare, momentous "ten-thousands number change". Once I remember my dad parking a couple of blocks away and walking the rest of the way home to get me, because the odometer was about hit a 10,000s change and he knew I wouldn't want to miss it! We walked back to the car together and the odometer hit its milestone as we drove home.

There is one important difference between odometers and sitemeters, though. As I noted a while back, the very act of accessing a blog bumps its site counter. Thus, only two individuals (or two browsers, anyway) will be able to see my counter when it reads exactly "10,000": the visitor who actually bumps it from 9999, and me, since I set sitemeter to ignore my own visits.

So thanks to all my readers for the your day to day support, and to the single special visitor who enabled me to reach this arithmetic achievement, this feat of figure, this triumph of tally! (Hey, do I do a good Stan Lee, or what?)