Count on Me

The holidays are officially done. The last of the peanut brittle has been scoffed up, the tree is down, the lights removed from that sad little bush outside the front door and the hundreds of other festive things have been stowed away for the year. And that's not counting the hundreds of ornaments on the tree or the fact the tree has about a thousand of those tiny little lights...



courtesy of shutterstock.com

 I guess that I should mention that I have always had an interest in numbers. As a yute, when I could first count, I would repeatedly count all 21 of my digits. This has not changed as an adult (the counting thing, not the number of digits) as I still make mental calculations in my head. Not obsessive like, but definately a good user-upper of my time.

While driving on the highway I will see a sign indicating the number of kilometers (miles to my US cousins) and calculate at present speed how long until my arrival. I will do that at every road sign. Perhaps the timer on the stove is counting down the seconds until the moose stew is ready. I will catch myself closing my eyes and counting down in an attempt to reach '1' as the timer sounds. Crazy, no?

This reaches to the world of statistics as well. I am notorious for following the stats of hockey teams. Points for players, goals against averages of goalies and wins vs. loses can be found taking up precious space in my head. Up until last year I competed in a yearly hockey pool with the folks back at corporate HQ at an undisclosed location in SW Ontario.  The winner would often get hundreds of dollars milk and cookies and the admiration of the guys. I think that my penchant for numbers helped me win more than my share of the goodies over the years and they recently decided to have an 'in office' draft of players that would obviously exclude me (unless, of course, I footed the bill for the plane flight to get there).

I content myself these days by watching the stats and monitoring the progress of the players on our local team--the St. John's IceCaps, the newest club in the American Hockey League. My lack of posting blogs the past few weeks has obviously taken its toll on the number of visitors. Though who could blame them? Why drop by daily to see the same post slapped up on the screen, gathering dust and being circled by vultures.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a long time may recall the spinning globe I had in the margin. Each time a person dropped by there location was represented by a mark on the globe. It was very cool. Unfortunately it made me dizzy and I fell from my office chair way too much. My wife, however, blames it on the single malt. Whatever.

I HAD to have a (free) counter thingy to keep track of those kind folks who visited my humble blog. I noticed that quite a few people were using Flagcounter and I made the switch. It keeps count of the countries who attend the blog and also the states and provinces of those in America and Canada. For a fee you can open other provincial and state counters for a number of foreign countries.

I have had the feature on my blog for about a year and see that I have had visitors from 112 countries. I quick peek into Wikipedia reveals that there are 192 sovereign states and an additional 13 states whose sovereignity is disputed giving a total of 205 countries in the world. I have therefore had visits from 54.6% of the countries (no, I did not figure that out in my head). This year I have had over 3100 US visitors, 2000 from Canada (thanks mum), 1000 from the UK and 300 from Australia.  Since the first of January I have had visitors from four new countries. Hello! to that person from Saint Kitts and Nevis who dropped by on the first of January. On a side note...Saint Kitts and Nevis is only 104 square miles in area with a population of about 51,300.

Are you sick of me throwing out numbers yet? Har! I could go on all day. Anyway, whether you are a new visitor or have tolerated me since my beginnings in 2009 I'd like to wish you all a Happy 2012! Health and happiness to my writing and non-writing friends. Incidentaly, if you add 13 to 2012 and then take the square root, the answer is 45...