2015 in review

And it’s that time of the year again where blogs across WordPress.com are invaded by fireworks.

I’ll forgive you if you skip this – I hardly expect you to obsess over my stats – but I’m posting it here for easy reference for my own sake.

Short version: total views are up, in spite of number of posts being less than half of last year. The number of countries visited has also gone up, and the map on my stats page had several new spots filled in this year.

Thanks to all of you who kept reading, sharing and commenting. I hope you’ll keep doing that in 2016. Blogging isn’t any fun if you do it in isolation, after all 🙂

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

On the day job

Yesterday I hinted at a day job…

Remember when I posted about getting our car back two months ago? At the end I joked that a job offer was all that was needed to make my birthday week complete.

What I didn’t mention was that I had applied for a job just a few days earlier, and in fact I got an email inviting me to an interview a mere sixteen minutes after my birthday ended at midnight a day after that post.

Two interviews, a five-week trial period and another interview later, and today I started working for…

No. It’s better if I show you:

Continue reading “On the day job” →

NaNoWriWoe

So, I’ve lost NaNoWriMo once again. And don’t try telling me there’s still time – there isn’t. Not to write 47 000 odd words in a little more than 24 hours.

Going in I’d decided to shun the 50 000 words goal, and rather just try to write every day, and for the first five days I managed just that. But this November really wasn’t very conducive to writing. We were only home for one weekend this entire month, and the times between weekends were not exactly quiet either.

Among other things, we visited the wife’s parents (we surprised the mother-in-law for her birthday) where I did some gardening with my father-in-law while listening to India soundly thrash South Africa in cricket. We visisted one of our best friends (whom we hadn’t seen in almost a year) who took us for sushi in Hillbrow while we took her to go see the South African production of Sweeney Todd. And the past few days we were visiting my sister’s – the wife was attending a workshop there, but she doesn’t like driving in city traffic so I played chauffer, and got to spend some time with my nephew in return.

After that first weekend away I just couldn’t get back into the writing groove, which is a pathetic excuse, I know, but it’s what I have. I’m still trying my best to cultivate a sustainable writing habit, but first I need to sort out my routine regarding the day job.

What day job, I hear you ask? Watch this space.