My Month in Numbers 2012: February

Hi, hi, hi.

It's happened again hasn't it? Only this time it's been even sneakier than usual and finished a whole day early.

Another month has passed us by which can mean only one thing ... it's time to blog My Month, in Numbers ...

19 = the number of posts created, by me, for my Month of Sunrays series.

32 = the number of posts created and shared by people who aren't me, for my Month of Sunrays series. Thank you to everyone who shared the yellowy goodness for me to pin on the Pinterest board.

2 = the number of special guests who agreed to take part , thank you again Kim Dellow and Flora Jamieson.

4 = the number of people who've sent me happy, unexpected mail while the series was running:  

My happy cards arrived courtesy of 2 lovely online friends + my 9 year old niece. Thank you ladies.

I was so touched that, in my attempt to share some online sunshine, some of it ended up shining right back on me. 

How could I fail to be happy with people sending me vintage school books and handmade notebooks?

D21 = the seat number I sat in to see The Spaghetti Western Orchestra performing live:

It was an amazing show and if you haven't already seen them, run to their website to see if they're touring anywhere near you! Run. No, hang on while I tell you how good they were ...

All of my life I've been pretty much allergic to audience participation [apart from that one time at Wembley Stadim where I joined in with a band who were swearing to annoy the local council ... long story]  and yet, while watching The Spaghetti Western Orchestra, I actually played along with the  audience participation sections which ranged from the clapping in time, to the humming in tune, to the singing on cue. Ahh the singing ...

When it came to the encore they divided the audience into The Good, The Bad and ... yes, The Ugly giving each section a part to play. Our side of the audience were The Good [story of my life ;-)] and we had to shout ou the "aiy, aiy, aaaiy" bit, while The Bad & the Ugly had to respond with the "wah, wah, waaah"s. And because that's not a brilliant explanation, here's a video I found to explain what I mean [try from 1 min 20 if you don't want to watch the whole thing]:


James, poor thing, wished we'd got to be The Bad. Because, he said, he found being The Good too high pitched for him to manage.

Make of that what you will!

4 = the number of previews of my articles I've been sent by 3 magazines I've never been in before. [If you're interested and/or if you're my parents you can get a general idea of what I'm referring to here,  here and here - exciting!]

342 = number of pages read to finish the Andrew Miller novel Pure:

 I really didn't want it to end. It's a definite contender for the title of  'favourite book' where it's battling it out with Ingenious Pain, also by Andrew Miller. 

I'm going to stop there as I'm an Andrew Miller bore, and if I hang around much longer I'll be confessing at how I frequently have to pause while reading his work, because I get utterly intoxicated; dreamy; awed; bowled over; elevated and plain drunk on his sentences ... especially the metaphors. So much so I've been known to only get through a paragraph at a time before having to close the book and drift away ...

-----------------------------------------------
So, that was me and my February, now you can show me yours!

Last month there were an amazing amount of you taking part and I hope to see st least a few familiar faces again this time around. I'm going to be pinning your contributions to the Month in Numbers Pinterest board again this month, as I think it worked well for a few reasons:

• it's visual - meaning we could all quickly and easily see who else had taken part. It's also easier to remember which posts you've clicked on and visited with a photo.
• the increased visibility really seemed to get you all visiting each other's posts and led to lots of commenting. Which was lovely to see.

So if you'd like your Month in Numbers post to be pinned on the Month in Numbers Pinterest board then you need to:

• have at least 1 photo in your post - purely because images are what Pinterest uses to save your post;
• let me know where you've blogged your stats. Leave me a link in a comment here, or via Twitter, my Facebook page, or by shouting really loudly. Or sky-writing. Whatever's easiest.

Also,

• Please consider leaving a link to this series in your blog post somewhere [a very quick link at the end of your post is fine] as your sharing the idea with your readers really does help make the time it takes to pin your post worth it. And, if last month is anything to go by, it also leads to brand new people joining in with us all.

But:

•  if you can't or don't wish to use photos, or you don't want to be pinned to the Pinterest board, you're equally as welcome to join in.
• You can simply leave me your links in a comment etc and I'll come by and visit you just the same.

OK ... it's over to you. Throw your numbers at me. *holds out a large net, closes eyes in case you miss*

Julie :-)