Well, we have definitely made it to 2018 – or, based on the current weather, the Chinese year of the popsicle!

This month officially completes my 10th year of blogging. Yes, folks and entire decade of observing life around me and bringing you my perspectives and interpretations.  Admittedly, rather proud of that accomplishment.  I personally cannot believe it has been that long since committing to this small off ramp on the information highway. All started thanks to my brother Ron who provided the spark with his own blogging over at Dead Reckonings – link here. One of my goals for this year was to expand Life Intrigued to a broader audience.  I have mentioned this a number of times over the years, but finally carried it through.  Wildlife Intrigued was create and launched in the beginning of the year to provide a more public offering to the wildlife related posts on the Life Intrigued blog.  The new blog has introduced me to individuals all over the world and really pushed me to make sure my wildlife posts were up to that par.  Although an addition of a significant amount of work, very pleased with how that is progressing and looking forward to what that offshoot will bring in the coming year (there is one upcoming event that I’ll be posting on in a few months).  Note, for those reading this summary from the Wildlife blog site, the stats provided are for the Life Intrigued posting and thus represent a larger body of work of which Wildlife is a subset.

With turning of the new calendar, tradition continues with the yearly summary.  Our efforts with our photography work continues to be the main focus of the blog, however, this year brought a large number of projects (especially on the Halloween front), book recollections and still some perspectives on my daily life observations.  Although this year I pulled back from the Marathon distance, it was still another big year on the road with a record number of half marathons making its way into the books.  Still struggling with some heat issues, but went over 1,000 miles for another year with multiple age group placements – one of the few advantages of turning 50 (sigh).  I’ve mentioned this a number of times, but it is truly amazing to look back over the years (all 10 of them) and see what was keeping my attention back then and on a personal development front see the progression in my photography abilities and Halloween prop building.  I’ve purposely kept my political leanings out of the Wildlife arena – no reason to mix our broken political system with the tranquility and, quite frankly, currently more civilized ecosystem of the wildlife kingdom.  For those that might be wondering, I set my yearly goals at the end of this month to give myself sufficient time to really think about what I want to accomplish and what areas of character development to focus on.  I am moving into a brand new role at my day job which looks to be very challenging.  Add that element to the list of items in my idea book, throw in new ventures in Halloween electronics, new photography trips along with a continued strive to get healthier (is this the year of the obstacle courses?!?!?) and we have a recipe for excitement, challenges and another full year of blogging.  My heartfelt appreciation for all my readers and a huge thank you for all the commenters that have provided their inputs on my meanderings (that includes a special thanks to my brother Ron who pretty much commented on EVERY one of my posts).  Nothing makes my day more than sitting down at the computer and seeing feedback on one of my posts – please keep the comments coming especially if there is anything I can do to improve your experience.

Again, special thanks goes to my brother Ron for all the time he has put in on the blog, helping to bring my crazy project ideas to fruition and making the effort to head out into the field on our numerous birding outings in search of feathered friends to feature on this post.  He continues to challenge me on the bird count pushing me to catch up his impressive number.  Finally making some headway on that thanks to a number of birding trips to other states (Texas rocked again this year and even Minnesota added a good number to the count).  Of course, he did take a hit to his bird count when he started up his wildlife related blog – per our agreed upon birding rules, our counts only go up after featuring the bird on our blog – rules are rules hehehe,   It does bring a smile to my face now that he is experiencing the photo processing backlog – not my nightmare 3 year queue yet, but it is creeping up there.  By the way, for the 7th year in a row I managed to hit my minimum 6 posts per month goal (yeah!).

I have high expectations for another exciting year around here at Life Intrigued and now the sister site Wildlife Intrigued.  The training season is already in full swing (albeit on the treadmill at the moment – too damn cold out lately), processing is in full swing on the photo backlog and, to hopefully no surprise, Halloween prop work is already in flight.  Looking forward to trying to hold on to my UB competition reign (not sure I blogged about it this year, but I won this year’s annual photography competition between my wife and I).  Hope you join me on this journey again this year!   Enjoy the details in my blogging summary below and let’s pop the top on that champagne in celebration of 10 years past and plenty more to come.

Thank You!

And now, the annual stats for the year’s worth of blogging.

Hit the jump to see the 2017 stats!

• According to the WordPress Stats: Total Posts 829 and 1,648 comments
• According to the WordPress Stats: 2017 Total Posts 91 (up from 83 last year) and only 192 comments (down from 197 comments last year but I did not have any comments in December so not sure that is really down – plus this doesn’t count the extra comments on the Wildlife Intrigued side)
• Total blog pages this year (according to MS Word): 637 (down from my output of 658 last year – so less pages, but more thorough content based on word count!)
• Total number of words this year (according to MS Word): 92,085 (up from last year’s 83,035)
• Post topics (some posts had multiple categories) 2017 / Total
  • Birds: 53 / 305 (up from 5 last year yeah!)
  • Fail: 0 / 5 (five years in a row – time to get some of these out there)
  • General: 6 / 53
  • Insects: 4 / 21
  • Observation: 66 / 636 (down from 71 last year, but this is pretty much my catch all anyway) i
  • Phoadtography: 0 / 16 (ugh)
  • Products: 1 / 21
  • Projects: 13 / 61 (way up from 8 last year – mostly due to a huge Halloween effort this year)
  • Ramblings: 0 / 11
  • Recollection: 15 / 99 (way up from 10 of last year – lots of reading this year)
  • Service: 0 / 53
  • Wildlife: 60 / 399 (slightly down from 63 of last year – still pretty happy!)
  • WIT: 0 / 2
• Blogs this year by month
  • Jan: 8
  • Feb: 7
  • Mar: 8
  • Apr: 9 (woot)
  • May: 6
  • Jun: 6
  • Jul: 7
  • Aug: 6
  • Sep: 6
  • Oct: 7
  • Nov: 14 (holy cow!)
  • Dec: 7
• Comments this year by month
  • Jan: 16
  • Feb: 17
  • Mar: 22
  • Apr: 16
  • May: 12
  • Jun: 14
  • Jul: 13
  • Aug: 19
  • Sep: 16
  • Oct: 17
  • Nov: 30 (that’s what I’m talking about)
  • Dec: 0 (eesh)
    
• Posts with Most Comments
  • My What Big Feet – 5
  • Fly in Food – 5
  • Dude Knows His Birds – 5
• Most common grammatical error: Pretty sure my brain tells my hands to type “their” but the fingers rebel and type “there” and getting a lot of “the the”s this year for some reason  – bad fingers, very baaaad fingers – the double check system using the built in spell checking and the MS Word semantics validation process is catching most of my bumbles.
• Number of WordPress upgrades: Well, thanks to the new WordPress update feature this is a non-event, but did add a completely new blog this year with WildlifeIntrigued which was a major addition
• Number of images used:
  • Birds – 280 (surprising down significantly from last year’s 306 – felt like I had provided a ton of bird images this year)
  • Other Wildlife Photos – 36 (way down from the 102 last year)
  • Other Photos – 333 (this is where the count went flying up from 272 last year – most of that was all the Halloween project posts.)
  • Custom Graphics – 1
  • TOTAL: 650 – (down by 31 from last year, but still a pretty good output)
• Languages used: 1 (unless you count Engrish and Brigrish)
• Completed Life List Items:
  • Added 1 more Half Marathon to the running year – 5 for the year – a new record!)
  • Once again exceeded the 1,000 mile running goal
  • Blogging for the 10th year successfully hitting my self-imposed 6 post/month quota
• Recollections: (note, my tags must be off since I know there were more)
  • Books: 5 – not too bad – already have two read for this year
  • Running: 8 – a lot of races this year
  • Halloween: 3 – my passion – left off the recollection tag on a bunch of them – there were 12 Halloween related project posts this year.
• Was able to check off 16 new birds on the bird list in 2017 – giving me an official count of 187 not enough to match Ron’s numbers but I still have a ton of birds in the tin that still need to be processed – 2018 is going to be a great year for my bird count
• Personal Revelations:
  • Once again the UB honors went to Linda!
  • Ron gave a mighty challenge to my bird count this year – but now that he has a birding blog it puts him back down to three so I have plenty of room now hehehe.

That pretty much sums it up. The new blog added a significant amount of work to the already busy workload with the man blog – still enjoying it and still planning to keep it going for the foreseeable future.  Looking forward to what 2018 has in store for me and to all my loyal readers, thanks again.  Looking forward to getting through a lot of content in my work queue.

Have a great New Year everyone!… 2017 is officially in the books