22,000

When I got home last night, I was exhausted. I didn’t realize how much thinking can take out of you. I worked virtually non-stop (except for my son’s hockey game and taking Avalon to dinner for Valentine’s day) all weekend on the Grapes of Wrath article. I had a feeling it would get some notice once a few websites picked it up.

But I didn’t anticipate that it would go viral across the internet. SSS was right.

The site got 22,000 visits yesterday. Our average is 5,500 visits. The highest visitor count ever, before yesterday, was 12,000.

For the first time in months, I did not turn my computer on when I got home last night. I nodded off to sleep at 8:00. I did wake up in time to watch a few episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I had no motivation to go online. I was drained.

This morning, my commute was so bad and it is colder than a well digger’s ass, so I’m pissed off and ready to fire away again.

Hopefully, we’ve gained a new flock of readers. I’m sure Smokey and Stuck will welcome them with open arms.

First, I’d like to congratulate Robert on the birth of his 1st child – Aarush!!!!

Robert has the thankless task of trying to keep TBP up and running. He has concluded that Yahoo’s contention that my site is not getting attacked by a Denial of Service bot is false. The fact that the site will run fine for a period of time and then go down completely for hours at a time reveals this fact. We have also examined logs of who is trying to get on the site.

Robert is working to reconfigure TBP on a new server to test how it goes. He is going to stress test the site on a new server to see if he can reproduce the same issues. Hopefully, we are getting close to resolving our issues so that Smokey will be satisfied.

Just try to remember how happy you are when you can actually access the site.