Hundreds of blogs.

Rains, more rains. In Japan, there's supposedly a rainy season (tsuyu) in June or so, and a lot of people there referred to a rainy season, but I think it represented tradition more than actual weather. "Rainy season" sounds like something in the tropics, anyway. Temperate zones have spring rains.

Blogger has updated its web page, and the process you go through to post. One interesting new feature is that it tells me how many separate postings I've made. This is number 363, or nearly a year's worth stretched out over nearly 15 months. One of the longer diary efforts I've ever made, but not in fact the longest yet. I filled up two fat spiral notebooks back in college, from September 1980 to February 1982, though the second volume got soaked while in storage a in the summer of '82. I still have the pages, long since dried and removed from their spirals, but the entries written with felt tip pens were mostly obliterated. In that way I lost my written record, for one, of the first trip I ever took to New Orleans.

Let's see. 360 x 500 words (I figure that's a good daily average, but it's only an estimate) = 180,000 words. I don't have any figures handy to back me up, but I think that would amount to a fair-sized book. Generally I deal in smaller packets of numbers: a magazine feature is 2,000 to 2,500 words; the The New Yorker was (is?) noted for its extra-long features, inevitably described as more than 10,000 words. On the shorter end of the spectrum, the columns in my former magazine always had to come in at 700 words. I discovered that Lincoln’s second inaugural speech totals about 700, too. So a good deal of quality can be packed into a low word-count, if you happen to be Lincoln.

As for me, my daily ±500 words will last until I get tired of it, or Blogger has a massive system failure, or my iMac dies and I decide not to replace it for a while. That is, an indefinte while longer.