On the Road Again (almost) 2013) #2

I have, what may turn out to be, a terminal condition. I am in the early stages of spring fever.

 All right I may be exaggerating a wee bit. Perhaps spring fever cannot (directly) kill a person. But it feels like this year it is going to be close if for no other reason than it might almost kill me to sit on my thumbs for the next few months. The sun is shining, the snow is melting and I can almost hear the whine of tires on the road getting closer and closer to where I am standing. How do I know I have the fever bad this year?  I was in the middle of a class teaching away. All of a sudden I realized that the back part of my brain that is always chattering away whether or not anyone is listening, was calculating how soon I could be in Winnipeg and then Calgary (the answer in case you are curious is Sunday morning in Winnipeg and if the Gods of Hitchhiking were kind, Sunday night in Calgary). I had to stop talking while I listened in to that part of my brain that was planning on escaping. I don't think any of the students noticed and soon I was back on track. Still it was pretty weird.

It is only the beginning of March for heavens' sake!!!!  I have over three months before I head west. Maybe it is because it has been a hard semester, but I have never so early in the year felt the need to be on the open road. I will have to learn how to lower the volume on that back brain. I know I can't shut it off but I also know that I can' t be teaching and thinking about the road at the same time. My students deserve all of my attention.

Witing a blog

I know that there are those who write blogs for a living and have thousands of people who follow it daily. The  March edition of The Walrus (http://thewalrus.ca/gossip-girl/)   focused on one such blogger. She writes up to 4,000 words a day - sometimes even more. This blogger has thousands of readers. My writing pales in comparison. According to Dazeinfo ( Dazeinfo), there are over six million blogs out there on the internet. Six Million!!! I suspect that many of those blogs are long defunct; people started them and just did not maintain them.   I also assume that the vast majority of the rest of them are written by people like me; every week or so we think of something to share and we write 500 or so words. Nothing earth shattering or even remarkable - just the ramblings of an individual. But still it is an amazing bit of technology. I have no way of knowing who reads this blog. But I do know how many people read it or at least have wandered into it. And I also know which country they live in. In the past few years there have been 3,700 views of this blog. In the last week two of those viewers have been from Germany, four have been from the USA and most remarkable,  two of them have been from China! How does one find this blog on the Chinese version of the internet?  By what strange route did they end up on my page reading about me getting my haircut? I am almost embarrassed. I have been told that it is cumbersome and time consuming to post a response. As well Google appears to be somewhat invasive  of one's privacy before allowing a response. And that is a pity. It would be nice to, on occasion, know how people found the blog and what they thought. So please feel free to respond. You can post a response anonymously.
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