The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.Another big jump happened at the beginning of 2011, when my church split, as I now have to drive an extra thirty miles per week (fifty instead of twenty). In fact, because I bus to work and walk home three days a week, most of my mileage in a given year is for church--and those aforesaid long trips (this year, one to Texas and one to Florida).
A minister said in a sermon recently that, in his experience, fewer than one in ten children stay faithful to the religion in which I was raised. I had always thought the numbers more like one in two. However, with the church that I grew up in having completely overhauled its doctrinal beliefs and then subsequently splitting apart, I thought indeed among my generation--which was in its early twenties at the time--the number might be one in three. So I figured I'd go back and check out my old high school yearbook (my high school was affiliated with the church), and try to figure out just how many still follow the old ways.I was thinking I wouldn't know the status of many--and I don't. But I have more knowledge than I thought I might--rumors of where people have gone, occasional run-ins at church activities (rare these days, since we've all scattered into different places, both church-wise and state-wise), some contacts on Facebook, or other online networks. So here it is, a rundown on those who still hold to the old faith:
The graphs pretty much confirm what I thought. If my guesses are correct, than 40 percent of the students in my class stayed with the religion in which they were raised. On a most liberal scale, the percent might be as high as 63 percent (which I highly doubt), but on the most conservative, the number would be around 21 percent--still not anywhere as slim as what this minister estimated.That said, we're talking about children who went to a religious school. That could have an affect on how many stick with the religion, though the effect might be both positive (knowing more about the faith than kids gaining a secular education) and negative (being disgusted by some actions of those at the school such that their faith in the religion is damaged). Years ago, one minister quoted some statistic that children of ministers were more likely (possibly twice as likely) to stay part of the religion; if this is true, then it would follow that the effect of a religious school would generally be more positive than negative.
My favorite international cuisine is Indian, but I rarely have it. In fact, according to this chart, I haven't had it in the past two years. That's not true, though. The statistics for this chart are drawn from my budget statistics at home; when I'm on vacation, I don't keep track of expenses in the same way, and so that last time I ate Indian (last fall), I was not on my standard budget. Still, the chart makes some interesting points.Outside of standard American grill and home cooking cuisine (American on the whole takes up nearly half the table), when I go out, I tend to eat most often Mexican (indeed, I love it) and Italian (though that's mostly pizza places).High on the list here is also Thai and, among the American restaurants, vegetarian. That these show up so high is the result of my friends, who tend toward these cuisines, which shows also that much of my eating out is done for social reasons more than because of my love of any kind of food. Missing, in addition to Indian? Japanese--something I used to dabble in more regularly but for which I now lack the Japanese-food-loving friends.
And if you wish to engage in some international home cooking, you can check out some cool recipes at Cook Eat Delicious. Here's a great recipe for Szechuan green beans.
According to Good Reads, I read fewer pages last year than in the previous two years.
The number of books, however, was comparable to 2010. Hence, the number of pages per book went down considerably. Note the difference here:
I maintain several websites and blogs. On several of them, I run Google Analytics to calibrate hit count and to see what pages are popular and how users are finding my site. Recently, I updated my personal website. That's the one that basically has links to virtually all of the other sites. It's about me, as opposed to being about charts I create or things I read. I updated in part because the look of the site had been the same since about 2008 when I created the site. Also, a couple of items in the navigation bar stopped working, and I couldn't figure out why.Looking over the hits per month, however, I am surprised to see that my personal website has actually had a small increase in average hits per months over the years, up to about twenty (you can discount February--the one with the most hits near the end of the line in the chart--it is an anomaly caused by my own multiple viewing of the site in trying to fix it). Where are these people coming from? Apparently, some of them are finding me via my thesis, which is posted on the personal site (hidden near the top of my vita page). It's about the short stories of Jayne Anne Phillips and offers critical commentary on a few more-obscure stories that is probably not available elsewhere; I'm glad if the thesis is of use to anyone.Anyway, here's how the hits have increased through the years:
I'd say I've done fairly well in terms of actually working in fields in which I have an interest, as can probably be surmised by the handy timeline below.
The timeline shows my main dream job at top, my main real jobs at bottom. This isn't exhaustive, though, because I have had part-time second jobs, and there have been other jobs I've dreamed of having. For example, at various times, I've thought how need it would be to be a screenwriter, an amusement park ride designer, a fruit farmer, a comedian, a radio deejay, a publisher, and a designer or compositor. In real life, I've done a little deejaying (for pay--it was not something, in the end, that I enjoyed), and I've done some design and composition and screenwriting just for fun.But I'm blessed that the job I really desired from about my teen years on became the one that I have. I often ponder what I would do instead were I to have to choose another career, and the fact is I don't know.
This is likely the last long-distance chart for a while. I changed phone carriers at the end of December and now have unlimited minutes, meaning I don't get a summary of my long-distance calls and charges.
And if you like the colors in my charts, perhaps you'd like these poems of mine about colors (or rather, lack thereof) that The Legendary was kind enough to include in its latest issue.
The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.
