Oh shit, the Canadians found me!
According to my traffic logs, the shoe tree is still getting lots of hits from Livejournal peeps, too. While I'm flattered that the strength of the photos and writing are circulating in the blog world, it is causing some undue strain. Since midnight, I've gotten nearly 10,000 hits with the

Of course, it's already starting to taper off. Something, like, 8500 of those hits were in a four hour period and the worst seems to be over. But... how long 'til it's in another blog? If anyone has some bandwidth to spare where I could move the pictures to and relink the entry, that'd be cool... if not, I may give some consideration to re-linking them to some lower quality versions of those photos. The seven photos that comprise the entry are in excess of 100k each.
So let's see; about 1500 hits today, plus roughly 1000 hits in January after the re-link when Photobucket croaked on me, and if I had to hazard a guess, given I exceeded their 2G bandwidth that I probably had another 2000 or so hits to that. That's.... a buttload of visitors!
Of course, this has me to thinking. Strong writing, with good photos... maybe I should start a nice little site of some sort with Google Ads and what-not on it.... try and write one really nice article on a bi-weekly/monthly basis and float it out into the blog universe. Perhaps build a readership of folks, or at the very least, link-blogs with RSS feeds. I've always been really anti-commerical when it comes to my own web presence, but this might be worth pursuing: it would afford me the chance to finally do something with that parchment from the university that claims I have a degree in English. And I do have a unique opportunity given my current vocation, one which permits to see and do things on a regular basis that a lot of people may never have the opportunity to witness.
I think I might be on to something here.