The Mystery, It May Be Solved:

A few days ago, I was telling Alex that I'd noticed a HUGE uptick on my flickr stats (where you can see which of your pictures are being viewed or learn what search words/phrases brought people to your photos). Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed it the day it happened (March 6th) but about 6 days later and so I can't see the particulars of WHY I got such a massive amount of views - 591! In one day! I get, on average, two to three hundred views a week and only when I'm consistently adding content. The periods I sit dormant, my daily viewership drops to 50 or less.

The lightbulb has gone off though, and I think I may have solved the mystery . . .



That rather crappy picture may be what caused the rush of traffic over to my flickr pages. As you can read, I made mention of The Yarn Harlot, Greg Kinnear and a little verb to describe the "style" of photography I was aiming for.

None of that was worth noticing though, until the other day when Greg Kinnear was on the Graham Norton Show talking with Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, The Yarn Harlot, about Kinnear kinnearing himself.

It's pretty damn funny!



I think a whole bunch of Brits in the studio audience went home and photo-googled "Yarn Harlot Kinnear" and found themselves looking at my husband handing in an American voting ballot, lol.

I'm Exhausted From The Explaining - In A Good Way:

The other day, my friend Alex took a picture of one of my cats. Blue is universally loved because of her crossed eyes and her goofy real-life cartoon-y features.

Enter flickr, and the world of outside perception. marakaramazov took a gander at Alex's picture and thought that Blue was taxidermied. No, really.

After Mara expressed her concerns, I did everything to assuage her worry, even linking to my real life pictures of Blue recently.

She loved a few of them, but others had her questioning my motives.

This one, she wrote "Sorry, but the cat look strange".

Yes, the cat looks funny, but so does my husband too! That's the point of the shot!

It has been really fascinating to communicate in two different languages (my English and her Spanish, but really my limited Spanish and her not-so-bad English).

That she cares so much about animals and their welfare means we share a universal language and I hope we can always communicate together.

I'd like to explain to her that Blue is not only very much alive, but shares a home with five other cats and a dog because we love animals, just like she does!

Is a cross-eyed cat a rarity in Latin-American countries? Heck, is a cross-eyed (bizco) cat a rarity in America?

While I'm exhausted from the research, I absolutely love the exchange!

If you were in my shoes, what else would you convey?