We went to the final Charlotte Symphony outdoor concert last night and saw the fireworks.  This could be Catherine the Great's next to last concert playing violin in Charlotte.  Tonight may be the last.  She could very well be going to Toronto in the Fall.  There is an opening at the Toronto Ballet for a violinist, and she would be a great fit.  A loss for us, but a definite gain for Toronto.

I ran 14 miles this morning.  Dave is running 14 tomorrow.  I met the group and we actually had a really good run.  My goal for the group was to finish in 2:20 to 2:30 and we finished in 2:15.  I'm psyched for that for a long distance training run.  Dave's group will do that run in much less than 2 hours.  But that's why we don't run those distances together.

OK.  So I figure that most people are not going to read this today, and folks who do can get a little Blog lesson.  I figure that most of you reading today are my friends/family and don't know much about blogs, so here goes: On Salon.com's blogs, there is a link to see the number of people reading the blog:  blogs.salon.com/rankings.html.  If you click on the name of the blog, you can see where some of the people found the blog.  For me, most people link to me from the listing of most recently updated blogs: http://blogs.salon.com/ which is a list of the blogs updated in the last 12 hours.  I have actually found a couple of cool blogs this way including Lifechanges...Delayed, a man who is blogging about his and his wife's journey into Parenthood and generally, Life.  You can also see if someone did a web search and ended up on your page.  You can even see what they were searching for.  By clinking on the link, you can rerun the search that was used to find the blog.  I found that that a few people have found my blog searching for "Frank Eastway Paint" and "puppy gates."  "Cantalope Plants" was popular a few times, too. 

OK.  So, sometimes when I'm really bored, I look at the other really popular blogs and check their links on the rankings page to see who is reading them to see why they are so popular.  For The Julie/Julia Project, a lot of web sites are linked directly to her blog (including my school home page), and also there are a lot of google and yahoo searches for her and her blog specifically.  The other popular blogs on Salon.com are mostly porn related and that really isn't all that interesting to me except for the occassional "what are they talking about???" prurient curiosity.  But these sites get thousands of hits per day!!

So there is one blog that gets hundreds of hits per day whose name, though catchy, make me anxious, "Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex With You."  It's not porn, but is about why men and women have a hard time staying "active" after marriage among other such topics. (Do NOT read anything into that as far as I am concerned!)  The reason I bring any of this up is that I really like looking at the searches people have done that lead them to that particular blog. They are so sad.  When I was first explaining it to Dave, it sounded "racy" but it's not that way at all.  It makes me want to go find these people and go "Oh, honey.  Are you ok????"  I just imagine people sitting at their work computers having real problems and trying to solve them via google or yahoo searches: "Newlwed, wife won't have sex," "suspect wife neighbor affair," "how to tell if your husband is having an affair", and truly the most heart-wrenching search I found:  "I won't to have sex" which is sad on so many levels.  One funny search I found?  "Nigella fantasy" which has to be about Nigella Lawson, food porn star.  (For those of you not in the "know:" fans of the cable cooking shows are watching food porn)

So why bring this up?  To be honest, I keep thinking about those people doing those searches.  Especially that poor teenage boy who won'ts to have sex. You will not, dear.  You will not. 

And it is kind of funny. 

11:07:57 AM