Well, razz my berries!

I do things just to be goofy.  I think nothing will come of these things, the people I know will accept my goofiness and move on.  Or, I do something like invite Henry Rollins to my house for dinner when he's in Austin and laugh when he answers me five minutes later declining.  I didn't expect him take me up on my offer, but five minutes?  Henry!?  Do you spend all day checking your email?

But, sometimes, it doesn't end that way.  When Scott and I decided to be remarried in Las Vegas for our 20th anniversary I sent evites out to everyone we knew.  I did this as a joke.  But then eleven people booked hotel rooms, packed suitcases, left their homes and traveled distances to met us in sin city to help us celebrate.  I couldn't believe it!  People got on planes! My friend Steve bought a suit!

I was really touched and as friends got in touch to say "Yeah!  We're in!" and the guest count went up, I was moved to tears.  I'm new to the whole self-esteem thing, so gestures of affection are difficult for me to accept.  But I'm trying.

My most recent goofy act was to leave a message for Penn Jillette on his tweet pointing to my blog entry about Teller liking my hair.  I then went on about my business of cleaning, cooking, child/husband caring and grooming myself.

I was updating my blog and decided to check my stats.  It's a feature where I can see how many times the page has been viewed in a day, a month, over the life of the page and where the viewers are in the world.  I appreciate people reading my essays and I like to see that my friends are checking in.   Gives me the warm fuzzies.

I click over to my stats and see I've gone from about 20 views a day to over 60 in a 24 hour period.  "That's weird" I think to myself, "What's that about?"

I checked to make sure that my views of my own page aren't being counted.  No, that setting is still in place.  

Well, my mom is recovering from that surgery, maybe she's reading one essay at a time, coming back several times.  She has a lot of friends, maybe she's forwarded my page on to some of them.

But, the views are on this one particular entry about this compliment.  Now I'm very confused.  The traffic on one's blog does not jump by 300% without something happening to cause that traffic increase.

*I* wasn't doing anything different, I hadn't posted it anywhere else.  Oh, wait.   I went to check where I'd shared the link with Penn Jillette in a goofy manner.

Penn had put the response "@ Pafuts:  He meant it."

I checked my stats again.  My number one traffic source was Twitter.  People were reading his response and clicking over to my Twitter profile to see what comment he was replying to.  And then clicking through to the blog. 

Ain't that a killer?  There's a bunch'a people I don't know makin' the scene over here.  

Come on in cats!  I got a tuna-noodle casserole in the oven.  

Amanda's beauty tip of the day:  To dry nail polish in a hurry, put your hands in the freezer.