Back to Work

As a rule, Monday hasn't been one of my most productive days. That's why I've used it for gathering statistics, doing errands, and other less-than-exciting, routine tasks.

It just occurred to me: maybe that's why Monday isn't a particularly productive day. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Positive feedback loop. The Incredible Shrinking Man.

No. That last one's a fifties movie about a guy who gets up close and personal with a spider.

I'd better reconsider the Monday routine, although those dreary tasks have to go somewhere.

The statistics were the dreariest of the lot today, in terms of tasks. Summer isn't the hottest time of year for my flagship site, Brendan's Island (brendans-island.com). I suppose that's because it's the time of year in the English-speaking northern hemisphere when folks tend to get outside and enjoy the weather.

And sagging site statistics tend to drag my morale down.

A slight anodyne to that is a graph I set up in the Excel spreadsheet I use to track such things, showing current viewer stats in comparison with the same period a year ago. One page has been more-or-less consistently gaining ground for well over a year, and I hope that some of the losses on other pages are a sort of correction for some publicity I got about a year and two years back.

Back to reconsidering routines.

I didn't get my eight hours last night, due to a recurring failure to make a self-imposed deadline for updating a particular page on Brendan's Island. There was a time when I could get away with stunts like that, but my body seems to have gotten more assertive, and demands decent treatment.

Besides, it's bad form to delay tasks like that. Also just plain dumb.

On the up side, I found and entered information about a couple dozen more Minnesota destinations and diversions. They won't make it into the version of Minnesota for Web-Wise Travelers site (minnwebwise.com) that I'm cobbling together, but should make it into an update/upgrade I have tentatively slated for September of this year.

On another up side, I now have permission to re-publish the original version of a poem that was called "The Dean's Spell Checker" when I first ran into it.

And I'd better call it quits while I've got two "ups" to report.