I’m going to be heading down to the Outer Banks for a few days, and, as always when I’m trying to take a vacation, I’m leaving the laptop tethered to its docking station. I may post while I’m gone, should I wander into a library or similar web-connected facility, but I’m making no promises.

A vacation from my QWERTY keyboard seems appropriate for this blog’s fifth anniversary, which comes up next week. I thought up this little venture on the porch to a two-room cabin on Brier Island, off of Digby Neck along the southwest corner of Nova Scotia, on just such a vacation. Who knows what’ll come to me this time?

This blog had its 1.25 millionth visit yesterday, which means that there have been 250,000 additional visits since it passed the million mark just last February. That seems amazing to me, also humbling, but as I’ve noted before, the real news this year has been the number of page views, which shot up dramatically last September as several classes added the blog to their reading lists. Still, the blog set a new mark for the most visits on a single day just last Thursday. And last weekend I got a lovely thank you note from a poet in Iran. The idea that I might be doing something useful for poets in such faraway places pleases me no end.

There’s a certain irony in being added to syllabi, given my existence well beyond the periphery of the academy. The days when I could easily say yes to a short-term visiting writer’s gig pretty much vanished with the birth of my kids – my stint last year at Naropa was made possible only by a sabbatical on my day job, and there’s no guarantee that will happen again in this lifetime. Over the past twenty years, I’ve turned down a couple of permanent, even tenure-track teaching jobs that paid a fraction of what I make in the computer industry, as well as a number of invitations for one-class or one-semester adjunct spots. If anyone offered a serious position, I’d seriously consider it. But it would appear that the chances of that happening are about the same as the Democrats ending the war in Iraq.

So I think what I’m going to do for the next week is just to put my feet up, slowly read my way through this stack of books here that have been calling my name now for some time, and then maybe go down to the beach & stick my feet in the water. See you in September.