Fame and Gum Drops

Today's favorite moments included . . .

. . . daydreaming with Joy about what to plant in our future yard.  Joy wants a raised bed of her own, and a dwarf apple tree to tend (so she can have first dibs on the apples).

. . . building structures out of toothpicks and gumdrops for our home evening activity tonight.  Phillip the engineer made some cool geometric shapes.  Anna and I collaborated--she chose what colors to use and where to stick them, and I added extra toothpicks so the building didn't fall down.  Daniel and Joy built big, rambling structures that eventually collapsed under their own weight.  Joy then recruited Daddy as her architectural consultant on a second project, while Daniel just decided the collapse was a good excuse to start eating gum drops.

And another thing . . .

. . . about a year ago, I bought a vinyl jump rope and couldn't figure out how to get the kinks out of it.  I asked my friend Google for advice, but had trouble finding any clear instructions about what to do.  After a lot of searching and a few failed experiments, I finally found an obscure comment on some blog that suggested boiling the rope.  It worked!  I was thrilled, and when I wrote about my success that night I tried to make the post search engine friendly so that anyone else with that problem wouldn't have to do all the searching that I did to find a solution.

Apparently I was successful, because when I glanced at my blog stats this evening, I noticed that the rope straightening post is far and away my most popular.  If I read the stats right, it has gotten 33 views in the last week--as many views as the next four posts combined.  One random stranger even left a grateful comment back in October.

Just for kicks and giggles this evening, I Googled "how to straighten a vinyl jump rope," and my little ol' blog post is the first result.  If you just Google "how to straighten a jump rope," my post comes up fifth on the list.

I know, I know--it's not like I won a Nobel prize or anything, but it's still kinda nifty, and I'm glad the post has (presumably) been helpful for many people.