50,000 visitors
Later today Impearls will pass its 50,000th visitor, according to Sitemeter, since soon after the blog's founding in November of 2002.
While other on-line publications receive numbers like that every day (and Impearls itself indeed received 8,000 in a single day recently due to an Instalanche) — vastly more than its average — still such a number is very impressive in its own right.
Fifty thousand is on the order of the size of the city I grew up in (Great Falls), one of the two largest cities in the state of Montana; it's also the size of the seat of the beautiful California county in which I reside (Santa Cruz); it's not dissimilar to the American death counts in the Vietnam and Korean Wars — in other words, a city's worth of people and a very significant number.
My profuse thanks to all who have stopped by.
Please come again — very interesting articles, in my humble opinion, still remain in the works.