TWO!

Driving home today from the shop, chugging away at a nice 2200 rpm, which gives me the best fuel economy with my archaic 6-cylinder diesel, I was thinking what to write about on the blog tonight. And then it struck me: today is the 28th! That means this blog is actually two years old now!! Frankly, I can hardly believe I've made it this far, though I'm far from running out of things to say, let me assure you. Actually, I'm bursting at the seams with ideas of late.

At the one year mark, I had posted 181 times, and there were over 53,000 page views with a followers list that had grown to 53. Today, just one year later, followers sits at 80, page views is closing in on 177,000, and the post count, with this entry, reaches 350. Possibly by year-end I will be approaching 500 posts. Again, hard to believe.

This last month has seen quite a spike in visitors for some unfathomable reason. I used to get 250~300 page views a day for most of 2010. This month however I am averaging over 620 page views a day(!). I have no idea why there is a sudden increase, but I would like to thank all of the followers and supporters of this blog for your interest and enthusiasm. I hope that this next year I am able to keep you coming back for more.

And what of year three? I have been doing a fair number of build threads in recent months, and will definitely continue with more of that in the coming year. I haven't done any book reviews in a while, and series from year 1, such as the one on Japanese temples of note, will be coming back in the next while. I have gotten a hold, after considerable effort, of a rare doctoral dissertation from 1975 which involves an anthropological study of a Japanese cabinetmaker. The writer lived with the cabinetmaker for a year and wrote down virtually everything that went on, including cataloging the types of pieces the shop made. So a review of that interesting dissertation should be coming down the pike in the next little while.

I've gained some recent work to design a French timber roof for a house in Pittsburgh, and hopefully I will be able to write about that process. There could be some extra work on that project besides the roof as well involving the final frontier: double circular work.

In the Art of Japanese Carpentry Drawing series, I have been chipping away at completing the second half of the 3rd volume. Though I was aiming to have it ready for distribution by the end of the month, it looks like I will be another couple of weeks. I do appreciate reader's patience in that regard, and must apologize for the delay. I'm intending also to put out a volume 4 in that series this year, which will detail splayed post work, the natural progression from the study of the hopper detailed in volume 2.

Anyhow, lots ahead and in the immediate future I'll be posting more on the Ming table and wrapping up the French carpentry drawing series 'X Marks the Spot'.

Again, thank you one and all for your continued support and engagement in the Carpentry Way.