posts – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

SoCS — Mostly Sunny and Warm

September 9, 2023September 8, 2023Fandango7 Comments

For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has asked us to use the words “mostly” and “at least.” “Use one, use ’em both, use ’em any way you’d like,” Linda suggested.

Today plans are to meet our son, his wife, and our grandkids at a small amusement park. It’s supposed to be mostly sunny today, with high temperatures at around 82, so at least it won’t be sweltering.

Between the time we spend at the amusement park and grabbing a meal afterwords, I’ll probably be away and occupied for at least for four to five hours, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to read all of posts or get to your comments until later this afternoon, but I anticipate being mostly able to catch up with my reading of your posts and maybe even responding to your comments on my posts.

Have a great Saturday, everyone!

February 2023 — Meh!

March 1, 2023March 1, 2023Fandango25 Comments

February 2023 was not a very good month for me. And no, I’m not talking just about my efforts rehab from my busted hip and fractured humerus. That’s been tough and this whole thing knocked me for an unexpected loop by draining my energy in a big way. But what really has me glum is that my blog’s views this month were only 10,620. That happens to be my lowest number of monthly views on my blog since June of 2018, when it received 10,001.

I can easily explain the drop in views. Before I had my accident, I posted almost every day a combo post using my own daily FOWC with Fandango one-word prompt plus one-word prompts from up to five other bloggers, but I’ve given that up since the day of my stupid accident.

I posted my Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge and my Fandango’s Story Starter prompts on Monday and Tuesday mornings, respectively. But Paula Light has taken over FFFC and Jim Adams has been keeping FSS alive, and I really appreciate them doing that until I’m ready to take them back, hopefully sometime later this month.

I religiously responded to Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday prompt, but that, too, fell by the wayside since my injury. I hope to get back to that again soon. And there have been other weekly prompts, like Sadje’s What Do You See, that I normally participated in, but since January I have only done so occasionally.

I also haven’t kept up with a lot of the posts that bloggers I follow have posted, therefore I haven’t commented on other bloggers’ posts as much as I used to.

Oh, and I only posted 101 times this past month, the fewest posts in a month since I posted just 91 in February 2018.

I don’t know if or when I’ll resume blogging at the same pace and with the same regularity I did before I broke my body. But given my lack of energy, I’m doing the best I can and I hope that, as my body heals, my energy will return and I’ll get back to my old form.

Staying Alive

January 23, 2023January 23, 2023Fandango55 Comments

On Friday I’m scheduled to be leaving the post-surgical orthopedic rehab facility as I enter the next phase of my return to normalcy. I will be transitioning from inpatient physical and occupational therapy sessions to at home sessions. My primary care givers will no longer be doctors and nurses, but my wife. She will also be my primary meal preparer and housekeeper. She will also assume a huge burden of physically and emotionally caring for me as a result of my stupidity that caused me to fracture my hip. And I couldn’t be more grateful for her presence in my life.

I’m still in a serious amount of pain at the site of the surgery (my left hip) and my left leg feels almost like dead weight, unable to follow the simple instructions my brain is sending it. My energy level, particularly after going through rigorous physical/occupational therapy sessions, is drained. I know it’s going to take a lot of time, effort, and patience before I will be back on my own two feet, literally.

So, on to the point of this post. I have been able to keep my daily FOWC with Fandango prompt going because I usually have a few weeks worth of those daily posts scheduled in advance. And I think, even while focusing on my physical recovery, I will be able to keep them going. I’ll probably be able to keep my Flashback Friday posts going, as that mostly involves reblogging a previous post. But I have other prompt posts that might not fare so well in the near term:

Monday’s Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge (#FFFC)
Tuesday’s Fandango’s Story Starter (#FSS)
Wednesday’s Fandango’s Provocative Question (#FPQ)
Sunday’s (sometimes) Fandango’s Who Won the Week (#FWWTW)

These posts will have to go on hiatus until I get my mojo back. I just don’t have the energy or motivation right now to keep them going. If any of you would be interested in temporarily (or possibly permanently) taking over any of these challenges, please let me know. Otherwise, these four aforementioned posts will be off the radar for a while.

While I’ve been trying as best I can to read and respond to your comments on my way fewer posts these past nine days, I have not done as well keeping up with your posts. I hope, as the weeks go by and my recovery proceeds, to resume reading your posts more regularly and to be able to respond to the prompts and challenges many of you post.

And again, thank you for your well wishes since my fall.

Streak

November 29, 2022November 29, 2022Fandango35 Comments

I woke up this morning to see in my notifications that I have reached a significant, in my opinion, milestone here on WordPress. Today marks two-thousandth straight day that I have posted at least one post on my blog. Pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

I was thinking that maybe I should take tomorrow off and start a new consecutive days streak on Thursday. But I can’t because I already have three post scheduled to be published tomorrow.

Well, maybe I’ll try for 3,000 straight days…if I live that long.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — July 22nd

July 22, 2022July 21, 2022Fandango15 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 22nd) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on July 22, 2017.

May Your Life Be Filled With Likes

An irritating tap, tap, tap on his shoulder awakened Stanley from his dormant state. Without opening his eyes or looking up, he practically screamed, “WHAT?!”

“Stanley, you’re asleep at your desk.” Stanley sat up abruptly upon hearing the voice of his boss. “Are you not getting enough sleep?” his boss inquired. “Are you ill?”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“Then why are you sleeping at your desk?”

Stanley let out a deep sigh. “I have a wife and kids who are always demanding my attention. I have a dog and a cat that need to be tended to.” Stanley looked up at his boss and continued. “I have books to read, TV shows to watch, meals to eat, personal hygiene to take care of, and sleep to get.”

“Yes, Stanley, we all have those demands on our lives, but you also have this job,” the boss said. “And we need you to be awake and alert when you are here at the office. We need you to do your job.”

“But I also have my blog,” Stanley said, plaintively. “I have posts to write, comments to respond to, and other bloggers’ posts to read and comment on.”

Stanley’s boss couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“So I stay up late most nights,” Stanley explained. “Sometimes the whole night,” he continued, “to keep up with my blog.”

“I can understand that, Stanley, and I appreciate your honesty,” his boss said. “So I’ll tell you what. I’m going to make it easy on you. You’re fired. This way you can spend all the time you need to pursue your blog, which is clearly your priority.”

“What? Wait! No!” Stanley wailed in protest.

“I’ll have Helen from HR call you, Stanley’s boss said. “May you life be filled with likes, Stanley.”

This post was written for today’s one-word daily prompt, “Dormant.”

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — March 18th

March 18, 2022March 16, 2022Fandango25 Comments

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 18th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on March 18, 2018.

How Much Is Too Much?

Do I post too often?

I have been averaging three, sometimes four, posts a day lately. But this morning I read a post from a blogger, Cristian Mihai, who has more than 120,000 followers. His post is titled “The 7 Golden Rules of Blogging.” One of his seven rules: “Blog often enough, but not too often.”

Mihai wrote, “You need to find a balance here.” He went on to point out that “it’s pretty safe to assume that constantly posting more than once a day won’t work really well.”

Okay, here’s an extraordinarily successful blogger with more than 120,000 followers (compared to my blog’s 583 followers) who is essentially telling me that I post too many times a day.

Then I read an article in Forbes that advised, “If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds. However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.”

Oh my God! Do you dread seeing my posts in your WordPress reader? Am I a complete nuisance, unnecessarily filling up your email box and your reader with all of my posts?

But how do I go about posting less frequently? What prompts should I stop responding to? Should I curtail my flash fiction posts? Should I refrain from posting about the moron in the Oval Office?

Hmm. Maybe the first thing I should do to avoid being a nuisance is to stop whining about how often I post.

Note: my original post had a link to the referenced post from Cristian Mihai, but it is no longer working, so I removed it from this flashback post.

5 Things — What I Like to Write

July 6, 2021July 6, 2021Fandango7 Comments

Dr. Tanya, over at Salted Caramel, has this prompt called “5 Things,” where she asks us to list five things about a particular topic. For this week’s topic, she’s asking about five types of posts we love to write. So, in no particular order…

Flash fiction — I enjoy writing flash fiction posts, many of which are stories I create in response to word or photo prompts from other bloggers.

Prompt posts — I enjoy writing and hosting prompt posts that other bloggers can use for inspiration.

Non-fiction posts — Most such posts these days are about the lunacy of American politics or other current events with commentary, personal perspectives, and opinions about what is going on in the world around us.

Q&A posts — There are a number of bloggers who regularly pose questions for us to answer. Sometimes the questions are serious ones, sometimes they are a mixture of serious and funny ones, and sometimes they are all fun and games. I enjoy trying to display common sense, wisdom, and wit in my responses to such Q&A prompts.

This, that, and the other posts — This is a catch-all since there are no other specific types of posts I “love” to write. I will occasionally try to write poetry, but I’m really bad at it. And I enjoy Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday prompt, but that’s about it when it comes to writing posts that focus on music.

Four Years

May 10, 2021May 10, 2021FandangoLeave a comment

WordPress sent me a notification this morning that I registered this blog on WordPress.com four years ago today. It took me four days to publish my first post.

Since I was just returning from a two-year blogging hiatus after I abruptly ended my previous blog, I wasn’t sure how frequently I would post to my new blog or even how long I would keep it going. Well, I know now that I’ve kept it going four four years!

And over that four years (if you can trust the stats that WordPress compiles), my blog has had:

6,257 posts published
1,446.8 words in those posts
544k views
153k visitors
4,481 followers
101.6k comments
164.5k likes

Not too shabby, huh?

So thanks to all of your who have visited my blog, who have chosen to follow my blog, who have liked my posts and commented on them, and for reading my nearly one-and-a-half million words. You have made my four years of blogging here worthwhile.

Outta Sight, Outta Mind

July 24, 2020Fandango34 Comments

B8900F42-4206-41AE-9F0F-9EBF30AE7037 I was quite busy yesterday. Busier, anyway, than I usually am on any given Thursday since my retirement three and a half years ago.

Why was I so busy yesterday? Thank you for asking. I’ll tell you why. I had to move things around in our house to make space for a new dining room table that was being delivered. I had a meeting with a company that installs whole house generators as a backup when the inevitable rolling power outages due to wildfires hit this summer. I met with a landscaper for an estimate on doing some work in our backyard. And I had to take a quick trip to the grocery store. Busy, busy, busy.

Why am I telling you this? Thank you for asking. I’m telling you this because I only posted twice yesterday. One post was my daily Fandago’s one-word challenge, “precocious,” that I posted just after midnight. The other was my response to the Three Line Tales prompt from Sonya, that I posted in the wee hours of the morning. Nothing after those two posts for the rest of the day.

I usually post three to five times a day, a few in response to various prompts, and others expressing my observations, thoughts, and perspectives about the shitstorm we are experiencing under the “leadership” of Donald Trump and his GOP enablers. On average, at least for the first 22 days this month, my blog has been receiving around 420 views, 135 likes, and 57 comments per day.

But yesterday, out of curiosity, I checked my stats. I saw that my blog got only 228 views, just more than half as many as it usually gets per day. And only 75 likes, again, close to half of “normal.” And worse, only 15 comments, about a quarter of my average number of daily comments.

This precipitous drop in stats is due either to the lack of quality in my two posts or the fact that I only posted two posts. Or maybe both.

Well, this leads me to just one course of action. My blog needs a facelift. I need to pick out a new theme, a different design.

Actually, that’s not true. I’m not considering giving my blog a facelift. However, since I’m responding to Di’s Three Things Challenge prompt, where the words are “busier,” “space,” and “facelift,” saying that about giving my blog a facelift was the only way I could figure out how to use all three of her words.

Time Flies

May 10, 2020Fandango42 Comments

3A8A571B-BE87-4824-B6AC-3B794A1CD62D Yesterday I received the above notification from WordPress. Wow, three years since I registered “Fivedotoh” with WordPress. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun, right?

I published my first post on this blog on May 14, 2017. It received five views, two likes, and no comments that year. Woo hoo!

Since that first post, I’ve published around 4,500 others, including this one. My blog posts have had more than 365,000 views from almost 100,000 visitors. My posts have received close to 114,000 likes and just shy of 68,000 comments, and my blog now has almost 3,200 followers.

All I can think of is that tagline for Virginia Slims cigarettes from back in the day: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Thank you all for visiting my blog, reading my posts, liking my posts, and commenting on them. It means the world to me.

And to all of you mothers out there, have a wonderful Mother’s Day.