Yup, I live in a small town

Two freight trains crossing in Morris, Minnesota

The lead front page headline in last week’s issue of our (weekly) local newspaper?

Stalled train tangles traffic on Thursday

Yup. That’s what passes for news in our happy little world. The train had brake problems and ended up parked for two hours, initially blocking all 5 crossings in town; at some point they split the train and opened up the southernmost crossing rejoining the sundered halves of town. This was the day (10 Oct) that I brought WeatherGrrrl home from the hospital after her knee replacement surgery, and as part of borrowing a friend’s van to collect WeatherGrrrl in (thanks KK!), I ended up crossing those tracks three times while all this was going on. Thus I can attest that the Morris Police peeps were out directing traffic and being genuinely useful as I was moving back and forth, so big thanks to them for helping manage what passes for a big deal out here in the rural wilderness.

My favorite line from the article (emphasis mine):

For the next two hours, officers from the MPD helped keep traffic moving along Highway 28 and Pacific Avenue, two busy thoroughfares during the morning commute.

Well, I guess Highway 28 does have the only two traffic lights in town. That makes it a busy thoroughfare, right? Right???

Now I’m going to go back to watching construction vehicles push dirt around as part of the road construction in our neighborhood.

Or maybe I’ll check on the squirrels collecting food for the winter. They’ve been enjoying gathering up half-eaten apples from our trees, and tucking them in all sorts of interesting places.

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Holy Crap! Over 5,000 views in one day!

A student shows off her work to the judges in the 2010 UMM Fashion Trashion show
A student shows off her work to the judges in the 2010 UMM Fashion Trashion show

Friday was the second annual Fashion Trashion show, where a number of UMM’s Studio Art students grace the runway modeling outfits they’ve constructed primarily from recycled, reclaimed, and re-used materials. Jess Larson was kind enough to ask me to take pictures again (I shot the first show last year).

I did indeed take a bunch of photos, and posted just over 600 of the least blurry of them on Flickr yesterday. This is no big deal – I do lots of events and post piles of photos like this all the time.

Except this time the view count just went totally through the roof. My events account typically gets a few hundred views a day, with small spikes when I post a new set. 1,000 views, though, would be a big day for that account.

I’ve had over 5,000 views today, the vast majority of which have been on the Fashion Trashion photos.

Graph showing the huge spike in views in the last day
A bit of a spike in views, eh?

I’m quite thoroughly gobsmacked, and not entirely sure where all the traffic is coming from. I’m thinking a lot of it is via Twitter, but it’s not really clear.

I suspect that the total lifetime views of my photographs pre-digital/Flickr might have been than 5,000, so to have 5,000 views of my work in one day is pretty amazing. I’m most grateful for the attention – thanks!

Flickr’s “day” just rolled over, and we peaked at 5,600 views for the 24 hour period. I’ve probably never seen anything close to that, and may never again. Crazy.

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