Thanksgiving was lovely yesterday. It was filled with family, and food, and the weather was so good that we were able to get out to the lakefront for a Turkey Day run. I revived my Holder of All Stuff role from a few days ago, and everyone had a good time.
I didn’t have the time or inclination to write anything yesterday, but I did check the traffic coming into this blog. I fully understand that the numbers are meaningless, at least to me, but I still check them anyway. I write the blog, WordPress gives me some data about it, and I look in on it when I get a moment. That’s really all it is.
So yesterday’s number of page views was lower than usual. And that’s fine, because people had better things to do than surf the internet. You can’t spend time with family and friends and be online at the same time. One is far more important than the other, anyway.
But I was intrigued by the location of one of the page views from yesterday. I had never before heard of the Åland Islands, and yet somehow there was a person there who saw something found on this blog. I’m blown away by that.
The Åland Isands are notable for a few things. Their population is just over 28,000, which is considerably less than the 72,000 people living in my neighborhood in Chicago. And 90% of their people live on what is known as Fasta Åland, or “Main Island.”
The bulk of the nation, however, is made up of thousands of unpopulated islands known as “skerries.” A couple of examples of skerries are shown above. It seems that “Åland” means “island” in Swedish, which is the only language spoken in this region that is officially part of Finland.
And so–in the spirit of the holiday–thanks are given to the person in the Åland Islands who found this blog, most likely through some sort of an image search. I’m not even sure if that person read anything I wrote, since I don’t know a word of Swedish, other than “Åland.” And because of his or her search, I learned about a place I never knew of before, and received still another lesson in how appropriately-named the World Wide Web really is.
Blue Batting Helmet 