Hello to Strangers Surfing the Blogger Ocean

In the past two days, Blogger has taken out (thank god) their ugly ad banner at the top of Blogger blogs, and replaced it with a narrow band (you can choose your own color!), allowing searches, and most pertinent to this entry, a way to go to the "next blog" which is a somewhat random selection of a recently updated blog. At first I just thought "neat, I'll have to try that sometime." But then...

My counter software allows me to see, if someone came to my blog from a link somewhere else, what that link is. They're about 99% from North America. Usually, the referring link is the Madli shawl Knit-Along, or Jen's blog, or one of my friends must not have bookmarked my page because I get a link that indicates that someone searched with Google for "YarnEnvy". (No one would spontaneously search for "YarnEnvy" as one word. Only someone specifically looking for my blog would search for that.) However, in the last two days, I've had hits from Singapore and France, from blogs that, when I look at them, I don't even understand, and it's not because they're in a foreign language. They care very deeply about things the existence of which I was previously unaware. Some of them are just pictures, some of them are just words. These are all sorts of people, and all sorts of blogs, and I can only imagine they feel about my blog the way I feel about theirs: "How random!"

And so I extend a friendly greeting to my alien visitors: Hello! How are you today? I'm having a nice day. How about you? I'm sure everything else I say in this blog must seem odd and foreign; how can a person like me even have friends? I'm so bizarre. But at least that short, common greeting should have made sense.

Right?

And yes, there are thousands and thousands of us who care as much, if not more, than I do, about knitting. (Of all things. I didn't know anyone did that anymore. But this girl is obsessed with it. She has a whole blog about it, and other people read it! Who would want to look at pictures of half-knitted sleeves? I don't know, but somebody must.)