I caught a few spare minutes the other day and decided to look at the webalizer stats for my site. The site is growing more popular partly because of my documents about running Linux on my laptop. But, what really got me curious was the sites that were linking to the site.

What didn’t surprise me were all the referrals from search engines. Big whoop. There are also links from a handful of sites that link to sites that offer documentation for running Linux on laptops. No surprise there either. Then, I ran across a LiveJournal page that was referring to the site. It wasn’t anyone I recognized, so I checked it out.

As it turns out, it is a girl in high school in Michigan who was writing about her upcoming visit to the Mall Of America in Minneapolis, MN. She linked to this picture in her online journal and basically said to her friends, “Nyah, nyah. I’m goin shopping!”

I was kind of bored, so I passively clicked through her site and on to friends of hers — mostly other Michigan high school students’ sites. It always amazes me the zeal, passion, and energy these kids put into their writings — even if their grammar is usually deplorable.

I know I had that kind of passion and energy when I was that age (albeit with much better grammar). I wish I could be that way now. I’m sure my website would be more interesting to visit, but in order to exhibit those characteristics (honestly) my life would have to be different, too. I’m not willing to turn my life upside down just for a more exciting perspective on life.

That said, I think there are probably a lot of things I could be writing about that I’m not writing about just because I’m not taking the time to even devote any thought to them. In a sense, I feel my life is just passing me by and I’m a little sad about that.

Having recognized that, I’m going to take a cue from some of these vivacious livejournal teens I ran across and try to experience life a bit more than I usually do. I’m going to try to get more pictures of my family like my kids doing adorable and interesting things and get them up on the site.

Outdoors

We’ve been having some really nice weather the last few days. Today it got up into the 60s. I had the kids this afternoon and we went over to the corn field that is east of our house and tried to fly our kite. It seemed real windy a few minutes earlier when I walked down to Lindsy’s house to get Eli and Lucy, but when we got to the field, there was only intermittent wind and I couldn’t keep the kite aloft. We did better today than we did Monday night, though, when we tried it before.

After flying the kite, I cemented some 1-inch PVC pipe together to put in a new trench I’ve been digging for the last couple of days that will be the main water supply for the sprinkling system in our back yard.

The soil in our yard is so rich and soft compared to what we had in Hyrum (which was 80 percent large rocks and 18 percent clay and 2 percent sand or something like that. It was awful to work with, but the soil here is a joy to dig.

We’re excited to get a garden going this year.