My First Ever ‘WordPress In Review’ Report

I’ve been blogging for three years and managed to stay under the radar as far as WordPress.com was concerned. Then, for some unknown reason, my stealth radar shield was deactivated. The WordPress stats helper monkeys swooped in, sucked up all my blog’s pertinent data, and compiled an annual report.

I won’t burden you with the full report, but here is the stats monkeys cleverly worded comparison:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 31,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 7 Film Festivals

I’ve never been to Cannes, but I’ve bought a few DVD’s from Costco. Comparing my blog views to the DVD sales stats for Costco wouldn’t have made me feel very successful though.

The report also lists the people who comment most on my blog. Here they are, and I would like to thank each and every one of them for their many visits. I know I’m not a top commenter on their blogs, but if it is any consolation, I am not the top commenter any where!

• 1 pouringmyartout  – He just turned one – well his blog did!
• 2 Mark Armstrong  – The power of cartoons!
• 3 Lorna’s Voice – She is everywhere in the blogosphere, so you probably already know her.
• 4 magsx2 – Travels all the way from Australia to visit my blog.
• 5 E.C. – Blogging for two years, and still going strong.

That pretty much wraps up this year. I expect my radar shields will reactivate shortly and my blog will return to stealth mode. Happy New Year!

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughn -

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
- Joey Adams -

Aquamarine and Boysenberry

My skin is kind of sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I’m told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it’s silver when it’s wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.
- Shel Silverstein, “Colors”

I follow a blog called All Write.  It is written by a man whose pen name is Harper Faulkner.  He is a very good writer, which is just what I would expect of a person whose pen name is so inspired. Harper has said nice things about my Colour Stories (though I am sure he would spell the word Color)  and even suggested he would like to see some photos of his favourite colour – aquamarine with a hint of boysenberry in it.

I had to look both colours up to be sure what they are. Aquamarine – I think that is the official colour that timeshare units are decorated in for the Canadian visitors to Florida.  Boysenberry seems to be quite a regal colour, but because I have never seen a boysenberry, let alone eaten one, I’m not entirely sure this is the colour Harper was thinking of.

No matter. With a little bit of magic in Photoshop Elements, I came up with a colour that I have named Aquaboyse.

I scoured my photos in order to show aquaboyse at work, but I was not all that successful. It doesn’t seem to be a colour in Mother Nature’s palette.  The closest I could find were four photos of water. The Latin word for water is aqua, hence the word ‘aquamarine’, which must mean sea water;  ‘Aqua pura’ meaning Pure Water; ‘Aqua vitae’ or the Water of Life (alcoholic spirits) and ‘Aqua concus dipporum’  meaning go soak your  head.

My first  water photo is at the Xel-Ha Park in Mexico. It is a nature reserve, but also a tourist recreation park. The lagoons are full of fish watching people, and people watching fish. The water is crystal clear and almost aquaboyse in colour!

The second photo is a lake at Fairmont Hot Springs in British Columbia. Because it is fed by a creek that flows down from the hot springs above, it stays ice free all winter long. The plants that grow on the bottom of the lake help to give the water a bit of an aquaboyse colour.

The third photo are the Dhows in the Doha Harbour in Qatar. The water is the Persian Gulf. There is a colour called Persian Blue, but I think the water looks much more like aquaboyse.

The last photo is a fish tank at The Vancouver Aquarium – a bit too green for aquaboyse, I’m afraid.

And there you have it – a brand new name for a colour. Thanks for sending me off on this aqua voyage of discovery, Harper!

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My Similar Nature Story:  Colour Me Green

Bee Fuddled

Hippie Cahier has declared that the word for this week is Befuddled. I’m filled with bewilderment – I didn’t know words could be given a whole week of their own! Is this WordPress approved?! But Hippie, though sometimes befuddled herself, seems determined that this word deserves special recognition.

I looked through my photo archive to find a picture to illustrate befuddled. What I found won’t surprise you – four photos and a little story that I call ‘Bee Fuddled’. You might want to read this out loud, with a bit of a buzz in your voice:

Bzzzz – I hate it when our Queen gets food cravings. Today she wants Pickle Nectar.

Bzzzz – And there are those demanding larvae – all they want is Burger Pollen.

Bzzzz – It gets so confusing – was I here yesterday? Is this Pickle Nectar or Burger Pollen?

Bzzz – I’ll be so glad when I can retire this fall. Buzzley Bee says we don’t retire – all us worker bees just die – but that can’t be right, can it?! I think we need a Worker Bee Union….

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My Similar Bee Stories: A Bit About Bees
Busy as a Bee

Not Very Wordless Wednesday

Apparently Napoleon Bonaparte said “A good sketch is better than a long speech” and from that we get the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  I don’t know who chose 1000 words – it could be only 10 words, or it could be 10,000, couldn’t it?

The blog Wordless Wednesday encourages photographers to post links to photos that don’t need descriptive words because the photo speaks for itself. That appealed to the lazy side of me, so I chose this photo, which I thought I would call The World Wide Web – a Bugs View.

So far so good, except, does the photo really look like the World Wide Web?  I consulted Wikipedia and they told me that the World Wide Web is “a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.” They even included this handy diagram:

This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWideWebAroundWikipedia.png under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

Certainly looks a lot like my photo, but just to be sure, I enlarged a section of the photo in order to get a closer look.

Yes, my web photo looks an awful lot like the diagram, don’t you think?

So, let me see. Two photos, one diagram and almost 250 words -  I don’t think I’m the Wordless Wednesday type.

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My Similar “Here is the explanation of my Photo” Story: Weekly Photo Challenge: Fall