Farewelling 2009

You'll have to forgive me for recycling some images I found last year but I'm quite taken with these.

Tonight we are off to town with friends for dinner and to see Adelaide's fireworks show.

I thought I'd indulge in a little reflection on 2009.

• I haven't read quite as many books as last year - just 104, which makes my total since I have begun to keep records (1975) of 2,864 in the last 35 years - an average of 82 a year.
• I've written 546 blog posts on MiP this year, an increase of nearly 100 on last year, after thinking I had written too many then. That's nearly 3 every 2 days! I need to exercise some restraint!
• According to my main counter nearly 91,000 people have visited this blog - that's over 65,000 this year - but I suspect that one counts if your finger even twitches on the keyboard.
• This year I created the Agatha Christie Blog Carnival, and we also had the Agatha Christie Blog Tour, with lots of generous and knowledgeable participants in both. I'll keep that up next year.
• I played around with various memes and the most successful has been the Crime Fiction Alphabet which has a coterie of about 10 bloggers contributing. That has been great fun and we are just halfway through the alphabet with some challenging letters to come.
• In mid year Bernadette, Sunnie and I created a new blog called Fair Dinkum Book Reviews where we post copies of our reviews. That seems to have been quite successful and has attracted a small following.
  

It has been a great year, emphasising for me the value of networking in the blogosphere. I enjoy writing my blog, and visiting the blogs of others. I'm sure it all adds to my appreciation of crime fiction.

So if you are a visitor to my blog, regular or not, thanks for coming; and if you've left comments, thanks for the encouragement. I hope to hear again from you in the new year.

So farewell the old year with gusto, and think about those new year resolutions!

But please, if you drink, don't drive!