I took a look at the stats for this blog for 2012, and in particular at the search keywords that bring people here. It made for some interesting reading, and fair amount of googling on my part to double-check the results. Can people really have found their way here by googling for “brown slimy mushrooms”? Yes, indeed, my photo is the #6 result.

Some searches are seasonal. In November I got a number of visits from people interested in chestnut animals (my photo of Ingrid and Eric making chestnut critters is on page 1 in Google image search) and both November and December brought people looking for pictures of felt advent calendars.

My photos rank highly for several product searches, where I would have expected more commercial sites to dominate. But their images probably get names consisting of long random strings of numbers and letters, rather than descriptive, search engine friendly ones like mine. I am, apparently, an authoritative source for images of “ikea shopping trolley”, “bugaboo the chameleon” and “stokke xplory” and “aerial straps varekai”.

The people who come here after searching for “space between cherry tree saplings” will be sorely disappointed when they find out that I do not plant cherry tree seedlings, but pull them out by the hundreds.

Several of my photos rank highly in image searches for unexciting search terms such as “standing on toes building a tower”, “jumping on stones” and “sharpening pencil for children”. Most interestingly, I have made Adrian the poster child for “unsafe kitchen with a child in”, “unsafe kitchen pictures”, “unsafe pictures children”, “unsafe kitchen” and a number of other variations on that theme.

I imagine some teacher somewhere searching for a decent summer-y photo of kids doing a wholesome summer-y activity such as jumping on stones. Or maybe a social worker preparing teaching material (for new parents, perhaps) about how to baby-proof your kitchen, and then using my photo of Adrian as a scary example of how not to do it. I wonder how many newsletters or crappy PowerPoint presentations there are out there, featuring Ingrid jumping on stones or Adrian playing with wooden kitchen utensils.

I have lost my blogging routine and I am not happy about this.

I used to leave blogging as the last task for the evening. When all kids are asleep and all musts are out of the way, I can focus on blogging and not feel like there is stuff I should be doing instead. But now I have imposed a 22:00 computer curfew on myself, to make sure that I can go to bed at around 23:00 and actually have a decent chance of falling asleep. (Adrian has not been sleeping very well recently and I really need the sleep.)

This clashes with my old blogging habits and I have not yet found good new ones. Those of you who blog, when do you do it? Do you have a set time of day? A weekly schedule?

Before you all start worrying about the lack of updates here, let me say that I’m still alive but somehow always too busy to find any time for blogging. I haven’t found a sustainable balance yet since Eric went back to work (i.e. since we have two working parents and two small children). It’s clear that I need to cut down on something in my life but I do not yet know what or how.

I was going to write my 60-month post about Ingrid. I had even sat down at the computer and opened the file with the notes I’d taken during the month. But instead of writing I got into a discussion with Eric about what Ingrid is like, what life with Ingrid is like, how our relationships with Ingrid work and don’t work, and so on. It was a good and deep and useful discussion but it took an hour. With nothing written, and the time at eleven PM, I am going to bed and leaving the month post for tomorrow.

Today I found something I did not know I needed: SubtlePatterns.com. The moment I saw it, I realized that this is what the blog design has been missing.

Somewhat tired for no particular reason. Well, a bit of autumn darkness, the tail end of a slight cold, and a few nights of not-so-great sleep. Thus, no inspiration for blogging.

Prompted by crankymonkeys in London I have now put up an About page. What do you think?

I’ve finished putting up my backdated posts from the vacation. Here are links to all of them: Adrian six months, Ingrid fifty-three months; daily posts about the trip: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7, an observation, and some concluding remarks.

If I did movie reviews, I’d write a rave review about The Secret of Kells. But I don’t.

This blog has a whole category for books, and none for movies. That’s no accident. Books are much more important to me than movies. If I had to live without movies, I don’t think I’d miss them much. Books, on the other hand, are essential. (So is the internet, for that matter.) And I often have opinions about the books I read, whereas I don’t know enough about the art of making movies to be able to say anything particularly intelligent about them. I don’t think in images, I think in words; I don’t process images as well as I process language.

In the evenings, when both kids are asleep, Eric will often watch a movie or part of some TV series, while I’d rather spend time reading blogs or a book. But I often listen to whatever he watches with half my attention. Sometimes I decide partway through that his movie sounds so interesting that I want to see the rest. And sometimes, very occasionally, I will take the time to watch a whole movie. Even more rarely, I will ask Eric for a particular movie, rather than just “tag along” with whatever he chooses.

I can only recall three movies that I’ve watched from beginning to end during recent months. (I may have seen more but in that case they didn’t make a very strong impression. And watching Ingrid’s “Barbie Rapunzel” with her does NOT count.)

The Secret of Kells, as I said, was wonderful. This one we all watched together on New Year’s Eve, in order to stay awake until midnight, and everyone loved it. It is beautiful, magical, gripping: a fairy tale excellently told.

Babies was one I had wanted to see. Just 4 babies doing their stuff: somehow totally riveting. Perhaps because I have one at home myself? (Review at Salon.com)

How to Train Your Dragon was just plain fun.

I just discovered that the mechanism that should publish my bookmarks from delicious.com to this blog has not been working very well for a while. I have manually published the pending posts, so a bunch of new posts but with old dates are available under Favourites on the web.