500,000 hits

When your blog ticker says you’ve reached 500,000 hits, is it appropriate to open a bottle of bubbly?

Pax Christi Chorale and Laura Adlers set me up on my blog back in September 2010 when I left the choir for a Sabbatical break. Back then I wrote “I blog, therefore I am.” The blog really was a lifeline whilst travelling alone in Europe; a place to sort out my own experiences and record events and impressions of things I saw and people I met. It was a great comfort in my dark time of grief and provided a venue for family and friends to express their own feelings. It continues to be a forum for people to share ideas about music, education, and Canadian culture.

However, I find the less calculated my posts are the more likely people are to read them. You, gentle reader, seem to have enjoyed my post on housecleaning just as much as any item attempting musical self-promotion. One of the chief delights of the blog continues to be the insightful, funny, touching comments left by readers like you, from Waterloo to Wolverhampton, to Victoria to Jakarta.

Mind you, I am not so naïve as to think that ½ a million people have actual read my blog. There was a period of time when comments on my blog went crazy with gibberish – opportunists piggy-backing on the site to try and sell stuff, posts in strange languages, and general meaningless traffic – so that spurious activity is part of the tally too. And you see the post that got the most hits was one that mentioned Mayor Rob Ford.

I hope this site can be a gathering place for information and activity. I’d like to share some more free scores and try to keep my calendar of events up to date, and to keep you in touch with what my students and other musicians in Toronto are doing too.
Thanks for reading. See you soon, in person, or online.
Steph