St. Patrick’s Day proved to have some luck for me – ya know, I’m really beginning to believe in this fate stuff lately.  You see I am a wee bit Irish there laddie, which may explain my likening to have a listen (and sing along) with U2, Mary Black, Celtic Woman, and a tendency to take down a mess potatoes like no one’s business. But if you ask me about Notre Dame, I will tell you my two favorite teams on game day are K-State and whoever is playing ND.

OK, there is a leprechaun’s pot of gold to this post. St. Patty’s night, about 11:30 pm, marked the 10,000th hit to the blog!

I’ve used this blog for a variety of things. From a timid beginning to a crazy today, in between I’ve covered among many topics:

• OFGrNe Eli’s heart surgery,
• a Canadian fishing trip to Halley’s Camps with Dad and TR,
• Mackie the Queen of Scots,
• my Family and nicknamed Favorites (FD, FS, OFB’s, OFSIL’s, OFNi’s and OFNe’s, Mom, Dad, and others),
• Trips and Travel to odd and typical, exotic and unexotic places
• OFGrNi Madison and Courtney, and OFGrNe Drake, Toby, Eli, and Mic – I have yet to meet (and photograph Cayla, but soon I hope!)
• Remembrances and memories
• Restaurants and my on-going love affair with food
• Embarrassing stories
• Turning 50
• EHR and EIR
• Music and YouTubes
• Photos and Photography, and lots of them – see Flickr and Picasa…
• Lots of College sports (i.e. football)
• the sadness, and celebration of illness and death
• stories that made me (don’t know about you ) laugh and cry
• statement that might have made you nod or shake your head
• a FS’s marriage and a new FDIL
• finding FS’s weblog and other favorites to link
• FD’s weblog and following her adventures to exotic places

And if individual blog posts weren’t enough to spread my gift of blab, I discovered blog “pages”!

• Home (where the “blab” can be found)
• About (the blog)
• Movie Lines (favorite movie line quotes)
• Big 8+4 – 2008 (Big12, mostly football)
• Saturday Football (only the College stuff here)
• Bowling ’08 (just a little game we play in December and early January)
• Bowling ’09 (we played that little game again…)
• Big 8+4 – 2009 (the next year’s Big12, mostly football)
• Got Away (travel posts)
• Better (life changes and inspirations)
• Thump (Sunday sermon notes)

I realize oh too well, two (2) people may be responsible for the vast majority of the blog’s 10,000 hits…OFSIL Becky and OFGaP Jai Jai. These two wonderful ladies always make a comment (online or in-person conversation) that only makes me even more incorrigible most of the time. A special thanks goes to Bec and JaiJai – who have become quite the online pals at my blog’s expense, having conversations and exchanges of K-State barbs that sometimes leaves me wondering who is really in charge of this thing anyway. I so look forward to the day I can formally introduce them to each other…myself, OFB Tony, and Gerry (JaiJai’s hubby) will only be able to sit on my patio, drink a cold brew or two, and stay out of their conversational way (although I might need to witness or perhaps join in for the blog fodder that would come of the meeting). These two have been fun to banter with and they have been true friends to talk with when I occasionally put my thoughts down on my shirt sleeve.

Other frequent visitors and commenters that I know of are Dad, OFB Tony, OFNi Emily, and OFNi Mikel. Thanks be to them for putting up with my attitudes and writings.

I succumbed to the Facebook allure less than a year ago. Of course, I was able to opportunely figure out how to link the blog “blab” to Facebook, so now all the “friends” can read my posts in the comfort of their own Facebook home
environment…meaning, I would like to think, the 10,000 hits/reads probably occurred some time ago. I have yet to figure out how to link Facebook blog comments back to the blog comment section. I have little idea who all reads the posts on Facebook, but I suspect OFB TR, OFSIL SueB, OFSIL Paula and many others frequent the pages more often than I realize (Facebook doesn’t have a counter that I know of) – if you guys leave a comment or just simply say “hey Tim”, I could plug your name here :).
Down the sides of the blog are all the current obsessions: Flickr and Quotes, Links and Favorites, Most Popular and Recent Posts, Comments and Tags, and yes, a hit counter at the bottom left (made you look huh?). One blog maintenance enjoyment is changing out the header picture across the top. I hope you guys enjoy the pics as much as I do. I am goaled to change those more often from here on out.

So, as of St. Patrick’s Day when the 10,000th hit happened, the TMay82 Weblog was 669 days old. That equates to a daily average of 15 hits (thanks again Bec and JaiJai). 186 posts received 429 comments and had 1377 spam messages intercepted. I can only hope the writing has gotten better in that time. We’ll see if it takes as long to reach 20,000 hits…I’m gonna keep at it until I run out of things to say, or you guys quit reading.

Thanks again everyone! And so I leave you with this, as this posting began, with a bit of Irish at you: