I'm not so good with blog statistics. Occasionally I look at them, but not so much lately. I have the same uneasy relationship with them as I do with box office numbers. My mental health, such as it is, depends on my doing the best I can at whatever I'm thrown at, but stopping short of getting emotionally invested about how many people care.
Yes, that's a dangerous thing when you are trying to balance a budget and eke out some earned income. So on a professional level, I care greatly about whether or not we sell tickets. (I am the master of masochistic box office spreadsheets.) Likewise, I'm glad someone reads the blog, and I suppose that if no one did, I'd just quit. But I can't pay too much attention to the numbers and stay sane. If I had to personally market my services, I'd be unemployed. Just can't do the sales thing. Feels too much like asking your friends to vote for you for class president or something.
Rambling, I am, and too confessional for my own good. All by way of saying that I noticed a few weeks ago that the cumulative blog stats were pushing 100,000. And Saturday night we crossed the line! If you were my 100,000th reader, thank you.
My first car (1969 VW Bug) saw me through to 220,000 miles. And at each 100,000 I stopped wherever I was (once in the farm country of Pennsylvania, once on a side street in northeast DC) and had a little celebration. So I'll take a few seconds to celebrate this milestone and wonder if it bodes well for my sanity that I'm still doing this.
Field Trip. Literally.
Hiked back to the Children's Theatre-in-the-Woods with the Instant Opera cast today. This is when you truly realize that you have signed up to work at a National Park. It was 99 degrees, but spirits were high nonetheless.
Congratulations on reaching 100k and best wishes for a speedy 200k count before long!
ReplyDeleteYay Kim!
ReplyDeleteThey like you...they really like you!! Zip zap zup indeed.
Cheers from the tropics.
JF
I'd be very interested to know about these masochistic box office spreadsheets. I'm struggling to find a tracking system myself, in lieu of actual software.
ReplyDeleteAlas, no high-tech tracking system. Just entering weekly sales records into a spreadsheet. Then each new season the figures are adjusted so they can be compared on a weekly basis (8 weeks out, 6 weeks out, etc), and we can see how each show is selling compared to similar past performances.
ReplyDelete