National Blog Month

November is national blog month. To celebrate there is a tradition of bloggers posting every day in November. I plan to participant in this time honored tradition (blogs started in 1997) and blog all 30 days of the month. How I will be able to do this is unclear, but I am looking forward to seeing what topics are covered during November.

Two blogs that I read FatJ and Bebe’s Corner Blog have confirmed that they too will be participating. If you have a blog, I invite you to participate. Like running a marathon National Blog Month will be more fun if it is done with others in an organized fashion. Going out and running 26.2 miles by yourself on a random morning around your neighborhood just isn’t that appealing to me.

There are two personal blog items that daily November posts will help with. First, I will be able to get back on pace to fulfill my blog commitment. After committing to blog weekly, I only posted three times in September and once in October. 30 straight days of posting will help bring that average back to my committed frequency.

Secondly, I am interested in following what affect daily posting will do to traffic on my blog. Monthly I average 570 visits. My highest month is 762 visits, which was January. I posted 12 times that month, more than any other month since starting the blog. I think that is more then a coincidence, but I want to learn more about how close the correlation is between visits and posts. Either way, clearly my blog is no YouTube, with its 2 billion videos views per day and 24 home videos uploaded every minute. I have set a goal of 1000 visits in November. I would love to have you check in daily!

Happy Halloween, enjoy what is left of October, and I will see you in November!

Name that vehicle

Growing up we had a tradition of naming our family vehicles. One objective of this blog is to find out if that was normal. Did anyone else have a car that they named?

As I look back on our various cars and their names there seems to have been a decline in the creativity as time went on. This trend continues today. For example, Libby drives a red highlander and we refer to it as…drum roll…the red car. Before discussing our current cars further I want to take a moment to recognize the vehicles of my youth that we named with affection.

First, and the most creative of the names, was Babe the baby blue Ford Aerostar. The name came from Paul Bunyan’s ox, Babe, who was the same color as our first mini-van. I would estimate we rocked this thing throughout the Midwest during the early 90’s. This was back when vans only had a sliding door in one side.

My older sister cruised to and from school in Bonnie the Bonneville starting in 1995ish. Early 1990s model, with a very long front hood.

My first car was Curt the Camry. I estimate it to be a 1990 Toyota Camry.

With Bonnie and Curt, you can see creativity was already on the decline. Better then red car, but no Babe.

All the above pictures were pulled from the Internet, not shots of our actual vehicles. I thought I would mention that, just in case the sunset and barn in the background of the Pontiac Bonneville weren't enough of a give away.

Back to present day other then the red car, we have a van. After leaving my sales job that included a car, we were in need of a vehicle. Lib’s parents were in the market for a new car themselves, so we bought their used van. A lot of people say they could never drive a van, but I love it. Vans are so spacious and ours has really been very convenient for all our summer travels.

The only issue I have with our van is that it is currently nameless. I would love your help, so please submit any suggestions you may have. To get the brainstorming started below I have listed a couple of other famous vans.

Dumb and Dumber is one of my favorite movies of all time. Harry and Lloyd cruised most of the way across the country in their Shaggin’ Wagon. It was traded for a moped after Harry made a wrong turn on their way to Aspen.

I love this YouTube clip about The Sienna “Swagger Wagon”.



Last but not least, a shot of our van. I guess we don't have any real shots of (would be great to have a name here) our van, so I again went to the Internet. Good luck naming this beauty!