Who Are You, Number 7000?

Dear Viewers!

Somewhere over the day today, July 20th, 2011, my blog was visited for the seven thousandth time. Imagine that!! Seven Thousand visits! Who would have thunk it?

Have you ever noticed the little counter I have on the bottom of the front page? About this time 2 years ago around the first Russia visit, a friend asked me how many people read my blog. I replied "who knows, probably not many, who would be interested?" He then told me I could upload a little counter to my blog to track exactly that, so in a moment of sheer curiosity, I did! I set that counter to only count unique visits per day, in other words once the counter picks up a particular IP address for the day, no matter how many times they went back to the blog (and again, who would want to?) it would not change the counter, they had to be unique daily visits. I don't check that counter every day, but just a short while ago I noticed that it was over 6900 and I was extremely flattered that in 2 years this little space would have had that many visitors. And I also became curious about how long it would take to top the 7000 mark! (ok, that might be ego talking!) Yesterday, I was showing a friend some pictures from Chukotka on the blog and noticed the counter was at 6994, so tonight I checked again and low and behold sometime over the last 24 hours one of you was my 7000th visit. Folks, I'm humbled at your interest. That out there 7000 times people have wanted to know what was going on in this little corner of the world is very special indeed. Apparently my visitors are from Canada, the United States, Russia, Slovenia and Sweden. (.... hi Kat!!!) I'm not a big name fancy, schmancy blogger, this is just a wee space about those guys that enrich my life so incredibly. So thank you all for your interest, and your support, it truly warms my heart to know you are out there. There are some big changes are ahead for RiverIce, there are adventures lurking in the shadows that I'm not sure we are ready for, but as long as I have these dogs of mine, we will be quite fine. And, if the timing is right, and nature cooperates there might even be little RiverIcers running around again to amuse you. Thank you again, viewers, you are good to me.

Gwen