400,000+

Sometime in the last day or so the WordPress stats page advised us that the Webner House blog hit one of those even-number milestones that human beings tend to find worthy of note.  We’ve now passed more than 400,000 individual views of this humble little blog in our remote corner of the internet.

That’s not a big number when you consider Webner House has been chugging along on a pretty much daily basis for more than 7 years, with precisely 6,442 rants, screeds, sad announcements, photos, Penny Chronicles, bad poems, clumsy attempts at humor, and other posts during that time period — 6,443, as soon as I hit “publish” on this self-congratulatory bit of tripe.

400,000 views over a period spanning almost the entire Obama presidency is a paltry number by internet standards.  The Drudge Report and MSN, for example, get 1 billion hits in a single month.  At our current pace, we would reach one billion hits in a little over 18,125 years.  It’s a worthy goal.

When I saw we hit 400,000 views, I searched Google for photos representing 400,000.  There are a lot of pictures of odometers hitting 400,000, and when I thought about it I realized that our family blog is a lot like an old, dependable car.  Vehicles that make it to 400,000 miles aren’t the flashy, expensive cars that men buy when they’re experiencing mid-life crises.  No, vehicles that make it to 400,000 miles are the basic, everyday sources of family or work transportation that have suffered some battle scars during their years of service.  They are the battered pick-up truck, or the dented station wagon with the scratch on the side, or the Honda Accord that still has a faint but familiar sour smell after one of your kids spilled milk in the back seat years ago on a hot summer day and didn’t tell you until you got back into the car and the spoiled smell made you want to gag, but you really liked the reliability of the car so much that you scrubbed the back seat and aired it out and used air freshener and took it to the car wash for a shampoo and couldn’t quite completely eliminate the smell, but decided you were willing to live with it.

This blog is kind of like that car for me.