it's gotten cold, gotten october - snow on the ground, or at least hail, and snow up in northern new mexico in the mountains. time to get going and let the cold air get me moving.

going to albuquerque tomorrow, to visit my grandson, along with his mom and dad, my son and his wife. the kid looks just like his dad did, but he clearly has his own personality too. i'm going to have a blast. it's a long drive, though, and it takes precious time out of my busy schedule.

i actually got to running around taking clothes into the school, and forgot my meeting at the lab, and that was a tragedy as i've done that a few times. as writing and promoting my writing take more out of my attention, other things are giving, and that's not good though i imagine it will level off after a while.

what has happened is that i've taken on these books to read, i read somebody's book, and somebody else reads mine, and it's all very addictive in terms of the fact that i'm getting lots of new readers and they recognize my writing for what it is. sure there are a lot of five ratings but i'm giving quite a few of those myself, and i don't always trust everyone's absolute honesty in that arena, since we are all kind of inspecting each other and hoping people will be generous with us as well as just read the darn thing. it's nice that i'm getting a lot of fives, i will tell you that. i guess that if i believe my books are five-quality material, then i shouldn't worry about the sincerity of people's judgement. but yes, sometimes i question the sincerity of mine.

i did a whole round of stats on the blogs, as i do the first of every month. as i reported here, a huge july is working its way through the system like a mouse gone to the tail of the snake that swallowed it. it is still affecting the rolling averages, but no doubt august and september were back to normal; september in fact was the anemic level of before july. it's like people have gone to work and are no longer poking around from a google search just reading things for fun. somewhere in there i figured out that i have about 36 of them, six of them commercial, very few of them truly successful in blog terms. they are making a slow conversion, from representing my academic interests (chat as a topic of linguistic study, for example), to blatantly commercial, having different topics but all pointing one way or the other to my writing. this one will get dressed up too, eventually, and point to my autobiography (scroll down), which has out there in its name. the problem is i've never been truly enthusiastic about blatant commercialism, so i'm kind of dragging my feet. ah well.
albuquerque will give me a blast of fresh air, or at least the drive will. it's about five hours of nothing between here and there, with a place called oscuro about halfway - that's the road to the trinity site - also the site of wretched winter winds that have at times blown whole trucks off the road. i'll say my prayers as i go across that plain and then down across the bosque at a place called san antonio, that is, unless i take the shortcut which also goes through some cool old spanish towns, but risks getting lost...oh well, don't know what i'll decide.

one way or the other i'll get that grandchild on my lap and read him a book.