My teeny-tiny unimportant blog generally gets between 60 and 90 hits a day from somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 viewers. The discrepancy between these two numbers is because my sisters and my brother look at the blog a few times throughout the day, thereby increasing my hits. While these numbers aren’t remarkable, they are significant in that I started with maybe 10 hits a day, all from my family. They had to read it; I tested them!

Some really fun things have come out of this blog. For instance, I wrote a blog post in which I declared I was going to develop a taste for whiskey given that it looks so good when Frank Reagan, patriarch of Blue Bloods, drinks it along with his daughter Erin. I was subsequently contacted via my Nana’s Whimsies email address by a total stranger with whom I carried on a fairly significant back and forth email conversation regarding whiskey and Frank Reagan. We haven’t been in touch since. For a few years, I had a regular reader from Connecticut — a woman whom I had never met. When someone comments regularly, you begin to feel like friends. She has stopped commenting, and because her last comments made mention of being ill, I’m kind of heavy of heart. I pray for her every day.

Because of my blog, I have become more connected to old friends and some of my cousins who read my blog and might even comment, making me feel closer to them. I get hits from all over the world. Saturday, I even had a hit from Botswana. I love to picture a cattle herder out in the wilderness of Africa reading my blog. I’m not sure where I think he or she got the internet connection, but hey! it’s my imaginary story.

For a long time, the blog post that received the most hits was one that I wrote about a woman with whom I’m acquainted who donated a kidney to a friend. That record — over 200 hits — has stood for a long time. It held first place until a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about friends of ours whose son-in-law owns Bear Creek Distillery. While donating a kidney is important, what can I say? MAKING WHISKEY! Duh. That blog post has gotten significantly more hits than the kidney donation. I’m not sure if that fact has any social significance, but it is what it is.

Saturday evening, I was notified by a friendly ding from my phone of a new comment on that particular blog post. It came from someone with the same last name as my maiden name. From the comment, I learned that I have a relative living in Denver that, prior to this blog post, I never knew existed. The comment came from her father, who informed me that his grandfather and mine were brothers. I have unsuccessfully tried to figure out what that makes us. And to add even more confusion to the mix, what relationship does that make his daughter — the woman who lives here in Denver — to me? Does anyone have an abacus I can borrow?

It doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day, blood is blood. My cousin-the-commenter said he has a vivid recollection of being in my father’s bakery. In fact, he recalls getting his high school graduation cake from Gloor’s bakery, and even remembers Mom handing the cake to him. And even more important, he noted that his grandfather made homemade wine just as did mine. And he admitted that it was probably lucky they both didn’t quit their day jobs to become vinters.

There’s a concept known as six degrees of separation. The theory is that all humans are six or fewer steps away from each other. In other words, the “friend of a friend” idea will connect one person to any other in six steps or fewer. I’m no sociologist, so I can’t comment on the reliability of this theory. Still, as Walt Disney said, “It’s a small world after all.”

Hey Cousin Mindy. Let’s have coffee!