Today marks the fourth anniversary of this blog’s first post: 4 years and 5 days after we closed on our St. Paul house, and 4 years and 16 days after we arrived in the Cities, in our laden Ford C-Max, for good.

The blog has been a sometime thing for the last couple of years. Being a bit of a stats nerd, I was curious to see the blog’s pattern of posting, and also how the average length of the pieces has changed over time. In the post to mark the first year I wrote:

The coming into resonance has happened; it’s in the asymptotic phase at any rate; it takes an effort now to see Midwestern styles and customs as unusual. (Or, dare one say, as “kinda different.”)

Here is the result, in graphical form, of the pattern of slowing, gradually lengthening blog posts. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The trend of writing longer really took hold when I began reviewing coffee shops, two or three or four per post. (For those keeping score, Kinda Different has reviewed 27 coffee shops, one of which has since gone dark.)

Kinda Different blog posts since inception, with word counts (standard error around the trendline = 301.9).

The blog saw 44 posts in its first calendar year (the last half of 2015); 21 posts in 2016; 5 in 2017; 4 in 2018; and 2 10 this year [as of 2019-10-06].

It is my intention now to be a more regular correspondent here. I have come to realize that I’m not really happy unless I’m writing and participating in a community about that writing. I have been doing so on the Internet, personally and professionally, since 1994.

[Note added of 2021-01-02] Once the pandemic settled in, in March of 2020, I started the group blog Suddenly at Home to capture impressions of a life that had shifted abruptly and radically to sheltering in place. This blogging effort has scratched my itch, noted above, to write with regularity.

An Unremarked Game

Here’s an odd thing: I’ve been playing a game with the titles in Kinda Different blog posts for the entire time and no one has caught on. In four years.

All the posts in the first calendar year have one-word titles. Two words in 2016, three in 2017, four in 2018, and 5-word titles this year.

Did no one notice? Really?

I’m inclined to reset to single words come 2020.

Another Anniversary

Today also marks eight years since the passing of my mother, Luthera Burton Dawson, three weeks following her 100th birthday, in Cushing, Maine. In 2011 I posted the obituary, eulogies, etc., over on my other blog, A Recovering Physicist.