The Hits Parade

So much posting, so little interest.

One of the things I hated about my former employer, the Portland Press Herald, turning Web-crazy was that the editors who switched to online journalism became so hooked on hit numbers. Every day my email would contain self-congratulatory messages about how many hits the damn site was getting. Half the hits (or possibly more) probably involved people either posting mean comments or people checking for mean comments and hotly protesting them.

You want a reason to especially dislike the human race, check what people say in reaction to political blogs. I've stumbled across a few, purely by naive accident, thinking someone might have something intelligent to say, and I've been blown away by the vituperation.

So do I care if my blog gets hits? Well, first of all, it appears that I have no way of checking. I used to have a tool called "Analytics" that let me track the number of hits, what search engines sent them, and what keywords were used. That seems to have disappeared in the most recent round of site "improvements." Second of all, I find myself not really caring. It's fun to write. And I've never really cared about being popular.

Good thing, huh?????

Options Narrowing

In a way, it's great to age. There's so much stuff you can't do anymore, the upside being that you can't berate yourself for not doing them. One of my sisters finds herself unable to vacuum because of the arthritis in her back. Do you think that bothers her? No, indeed! She lounges around eating bonbons while dust kitties collect under her counters. I myself can no longer bend to empty the cat litterbox. Bummer!

Some things, however, are tough to bid goodbye to. Trampoline jumping, for example.

We bought this trampoline at a yard sale five years ago, and every summer I'd say, THIS is the summer we're putting the trampoline up. Well, the years went by, the trampoline parts lay around in boxes or in less intelligent storage places, like the yard, and I got older and fatter and sorer.

It finally happened, though, and yesterday the trampoline rose like the phoenix as my husband and I dodged wasps and slapped mosquitoes and got really hot and sweaty, not in a good way.

At last, it was ready for the test. After five long years, so was I, and up I climbed.

Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, but the experience was not like I remembered from high school. When my feet left the trampoline surface, my skin and its underlying material (a.k.a. "blubber") seemed to leave a split second later. I could almost hear parts of my body faintly crying, "Hey, wait for me!" like a kid following her big brother. When I came down, my outsides -- two items of which in particular are quite substantial -- were still on the way up. It's like two of me were rising and falling in a slightly unsynchronized fashion.

As if this weren't enough, I think the bouncing affected my sinuses. Even 24 hours later, my face hurts and my eyeballs feel like they've been put in a blender on high.

So which comes first: getting in shape -- including strengthening my eye muscles and undergoing breast reduction surgery -- to be able to bounce on the trampoline, or bouncing on the trampoline to get in shape?

I don‘t really care, because frankly, it makes me ill now just to think about bouncing. I've got better things to do, anyway, like figuring out where to build the shuffleboard court.

Dog Days

The last of our pups will be going to her new home in Bethlehem, N.H., at the end of this week. Today is Kayti's first day of fourth grade. And Rex is finishing up his task of shortening the Quonset hut so we are in compliance with setback rules.

It's been kind of a busy summer here at my little farm. We hatched a bunch of chicks, birthed and nurtured five shih tzu puppies, grew a huge pumpkin vine and a dizzyingly tall group of electric blue morning glories, and watched much of our garden succumb to sogginess maintained by daily downpours.

More than once this summer I literally fled from the house at 10 p.m. or later to take a walk. I was starved for time alone. Much as I dreaded getting back into the routine of rousting Kayti for school, now that she's back, the six hours of silence is more than golden. It's platinum. It's uranium.

I've started volunteering for a free health clinic, mainly to keep myself in touch with how much I don't want to work for anyone else. We're having a little trouble with my training, though. For three consecutive Tuesdays, the training has been postponed because of car trouble, trainer's unavailability, and trainer's forgetting to come in.

I was there alone this last time, and not knowing what to do or how to do it, I passed the time discovering through an online questionnaire that physically, I am actually 2.5 years older than my chronological age.

This, believe it or not, was good news. I've been complaining for years that I feel like I'm 80 years old. So discovering that I'm more than 20 years younger than that gives me kind of a new lease on life.

As usual, it was tough answering questions about my life. One of the questions, for example, gave me the choice of "happily married" or "unhappily married." I checked off "happily married," only because I have a handy kind of guy at my beck and call. That makes me happy. So although Rex drives me insane much of the time, I'm glad I've got him.

But does that throw off the results? I don't know, and I won't know unless they add a third choice: "tolerably married."