AnonymousCoworker

I have become lax about checking my Sitemeter stats. The reason? They stress me out.

I used to obsess over every little hit. Every link was to be pored over and deconstructed in order to determine how I might best serve that anonymous IP address. I used to check my ranking on The Ecosystem daily. I had any number of different systems going on that I would use to monitor and evaluate my blog.

I felt like a teenage girl going home to exercise and have tic-tacs for dinner in order to change the way people felt about her. About me.

So I killed all that stuff a while ago. I removed myself from The Ecosystem, and I pulled out all that other tracking crap, except Sitemeter. I liked Sitemeter because it referred me to people who were linking to me. I liked seeing that, because it meant that I would have someone new to read. I’ve read every blog that’s linked to me, as far as I know. That’s the feedback aspect that I live for. The numbers are insignificant.

So, after going through the referrals today, and seeing a plethora of referrals to warm my heart from all the different blogs over there on the right, I decided on a whim to take a gander at my stats for October since the month had just ended. I saw some serious spikes, so I checked my yearly traffic to see how it compared to the past couple of months.

Sweet merciful crap, people! I took in 700 more hits in October than in my previous best month. I’ll take that as confirmation that you like it when a spend a little bit more time on my blog posts and don’t just post whatever crap flutters into my head, and that you don’t seem to mind me poking my head into your blog and leaving whatever absurd comment comes to mind.

Thank you all, so very much, for continuing to stop by my little corner of the world. My grammar-ignoring, poor-spelling, corpse-humping corner.

Last night the little piggies came a-swarming to gorge themselves at our candy trough. We saw some pretty good costumes (a 3-year old mariachi, and a classic Dracula) and we saw some crap costumes (a kid with a Jason mask and a Ravens t-shirt, and about a million Barbie princesses), but more than anything we saw piggish, bratty, snotty, greedy, little, germ-spreading ankle-biters.

The kids would come up to our house, dragging their bags along behind them, so full of candy that the bags were bursting like Mr. Creosote, and one of the smaller children was complaining of a hernia. First they’d shove their bags in my face, then they MIGHT say “Trick or Treat” or “Happy Halloween”, and after I gave them A WHOLE GODDAMNED CANDY BAR they’d say “Thank you” if I was lucky. More frequently the brats would oink and squeal with displeasure. “Can I have more?”

More? MORE? FUCKING MORE? You little shits are going to have scoliosis from the candy you’re already lugging around, not to mention the WHOLE CANDY BAR that I gave you.

Sigh.

It wasn’t a complete loss though. Many kids were polite and said “please” and “thank you” before holding their bags up, so I gave them extra.

And after two girls dressed as dead ballerinas or dead prom queens or something got their candy they went running back to their parents yelling “They gave us WHOLE candy bars!” That felt pretty good.

ACWF said I was being a jerk, but my parents raised me to not be a snotty little douchebag when people were kind enough to give me anything, and even though I hated it when an old lady would reach into a bowl and drop a handful of pennies into my bag, or religious literature, I always said “please” and “thank you” and I certainly never asked for more.

Next year I’m making laxative brownies and the greedy kids can have as much as they want.