Perambulation

June Recipe Round Up?
If there’s someone willing to host the Recipe Round Up for June, there’s still time to have one. Or maybe it would be better to take a summer break. What say you all?

This Week’s Stat Stuff 
I don’t look at my blog stats much, and by that I mean that I often go a month or two between peeks at them. I used to care about my stats, but not anymore. I know that enough people read what I write to make my blogging worthwhile. What more do I need to know?

One big advantage to not looking at my stats is that then they don’t dictate how I do things here. What I put up on this blog reflects either what I enjoy or what I think is valuable (and sometimes both) and I’d like it to stay that way.

Today I looked at my stats and found something that made me want to investigate things a little more. Most often, the top individual pages for the past week on a blog will be the most recent posts. (When it comes to blogs, out of sight really does mean out of mind.) Not so at this blog during this week. Five out of the top ten pages here are older posts.

• Number 1 most popular page, with more than double the views of any other page, is the theological term post on providence. I can’t find a referring page for that, either, but I did get a lot of referrals from email, so perhaps that’s where all those page views have come from. That this particular page is popular pleases me.
  
• Number 2 most popular page is the recipe for beer batter deep fried halibut. That’s still a relatively recent post, so some of the views come in the usual way, but I also have a whole lot of search engine referrals on that one. Everyone and his cousin seems to be searching for fried recipes of one sort or another (fried halibut, things which can be battered and deep fried, deep fried halibut, halibut deep fry batter recipe, to name the top searches) and they are all landing on my halibut frying instructions. 
  
• Number 5 most popular page is Is a Headless Chicken Stupid? I’m pretty sure Neil Shay will take credit for this one scoring so high because he has it linked in his sidebar as The Best Frivolous Blog Post Ever. (I’m still waiting for my trophy to arrive in the mail, by the way.) What I think really happened is that recently, somewhere, in some piece or other, someone mentioned Mike the Headless Chicken and all the readers ran out to google for more information. Here are  a few of the headless chicken related searches: longest life of a chicken without his head, mike the headless chicken song, headless chicken lifespan, living headless chicken, and one I won’t post because I’m pretty sure it breaks the third commandment. (Don’t you think it’s strange that several people would search for the same rather odd headless-chicken-related, commandment-breaking phrase? How does that happen? Same person, forgetting they’ve already been here, perhaps?)
• Number 7 most popular page is On Preparing for Suffering and Evil from D. A. Carson, which contains my notes on the sermon by that title. That post is always right up there, month after month. Those notes do get linked and used! And that makes me happy, because it means people are listening to Carson’s sermon. If you haven’t, you should. You’ll find it linked in the post with my notes.
  
• Number 10 most popular page is Theological Terms in Alphabetical Order. I’m glad so many click through the graphic on each theological terms post to the alphabetical listing. I’ve concluded that at least some people are using it as a reference and that’s what I was hoping for when I started the list. Those posts may look like they don’t take much time since they’re mostly cut-and paste jobs, but I spend lots of time vetting the information and links in them. It’s nice to get a little confirmation that I’ve put my time into something that others find useful.
  

Plans for Summer 2008

Oldest son will be moving into his own place on June 15 (and oldest daughter has gone back to Vancouver), so soon it will only be youngest son and I (and three pets, too) here at home. We’re not sad because we’re predicting that, just like his younger sister who has already moved out, he’ll be here daily to eat.

 

Also on our agenda is installing lots of new windows. My house was built in 1950 and many of the windows are original. They are in good shape, most of them, but energy efficient they are not. So I’m getting new ones, installed by my son the glazier as soon as they arrive. That means I’ll be doing a lot of painting this summer and fall.

 

My son tells me that I can’t expect these new windows to last as long as the old ones. Pity.

 

This Year’s Garden
I planted only half the garden space this spring. If youngest son goes away to school in the fall, it’ll be just me and the pets, and the pets don’t eat vegies.  Except for the dog, that is, who loves ripping pea pods from the vines and crunching them. 

Criminal Record Nailed to the Cross

Had we been among the watchers at Calvary, we should have seen nailed to the cross Pilate’s notice of Jesus’ alleged crime. But if by faith we look back to Calvary from where we now are, what we see is the list of our own unpaid debts of obedience to God, for which Christ paid the penalty in our place. 

—J. I. Packer in the intro to In My Place Condemned He Stood.

What are the reasons annexed to the third commandment?

The reasons annexed to the third commandment, in these words, The Lord thy God, and, For the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain,[1] are, because he is the Lord and our God, therefore his name is not to be profaned, or any way abused by us;[2] especially because he will be so far from acquitting and sparing the transgressors of this commandment, as that he will not suffer them to escape his righteous judgment,[3] albeit many such escape the censures and punishments of men.[4]

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