Wow! It's been a crazy weekend for me. First I find out that I was one of the winners of Whiplash Week 2. That was totally exciting. I was skipping around town Friday night with my husband saying, "I am a winner. I am a winner." Very ridiculous and very unbecoming - but ever so fun!

I use site meter to track my hits. Since I started my blog in November, I've watched my daily hit average inch up from 0 to 6, then to 10 , and most recently 20. I was totally freaked to see that participating in Whiplash brought me up to an average of 60 hits a day. Over 100 people a day were clicking through from my Whiplash entry. "If I had known you were coming, I would have baked a cake." :)

Yesterday we drove up to New York for the day (hi, Marci!).  First we stopped at Kinokuniya. I was soooooo happy to see that the craft books section had been moved and expanded. It used to be just a tiny set of corner shelves. I looked through every book on the shelves. And Not One Felt Stuffie Book! Can you believe it? Neither could I. They have a ton of clothes sewing books, beading books, knitting books. They only had one amigurumi book, but it's not one that I wanted to start with.

Next we went around the corner to Asahiya for the first time. It's a very nice bookstore. They had one felt stuffie book, but it was just Sanrio characters. I love Hello Kitty as much as the next girl (maybe even more) but I want a mix of stuff. I did, however, buy the notepad in the picture above. There is a sheet of great stickers and a mix of 5 papers inside. Yay!

The third bookstore on our list was Strand Books. Here I found the Happy Hooker for $7.97 (hoo-ray!) and a very detailed book called Patterns from Finished Clothes. I just bought the coolest skirt from H&M in the only color they had in my size. I hope I can make myself some more using that book.

The last bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., is one of our favorite.  I picked up a Jim Thompson novel. He was a pulp fiction writer in the 40s and 50s who wrote classics such as The Grifters. I started reading his and  David Goodis' books last summer at the park and I want to continue this summer. There's nothing like reading a bleak, tense novel on a sunny afternoon in the park.

We did all this before lunch! I freakin' love New York! We got home last night and just tumbled into bed.

This morning, I checked my stats on site meter. Just curious how my hits went this weekend, you know, since I'm such a huge celebrity and all. On the summary screen it said Average Per Day 401. What? From 60 to 401? How do they set the averages on this thing? Then I checked the graph for page visits for the week and the graph said I had 2200 hits on Sunday. My first thought was that Site Meter was way-jacked-up. I figured their database or something was just wigging out. What a shame, I thought, now my stats were all messed up.

Then I looked at the Recent Visitors by Referral. Boing Boing? What is that? A little investigating and I discovered that someone submitted my site to be included in the Boing Boing blog, and Boing Boing decided to take images from my site and post a little shout-out to my dirty/clean dishes indicator. The images link to my site and there is also a text link (named "Link") to my site. Their tiny 17 word blog entry drove 2200 hits to my site yesterday. I'm already at 2800 for today.

It's great to get traffic, and it's gratifying to know my post cracked up a bunch of people, but I'd feel a whole lot better about it if they had let me know they were taking and altering photos from my site to use as content on their site. At least they linked to me. I'm curious to see how long I keep getting thousands and thousands of hits a day. Here is the crazy hit graph, if you want a laugh.

So here I am, totally exhausted from walking around for hours and hours yesterday and getting almost no sleep. I've decided that I'm going to have to figure out how to use Amazon Japan and order the felt stuffie books I want. I feel so much better about spending money when I just 'find' the book in the bookstore. The whole premeditated ordering thing is so not-thrifty, but I need to find a way to use up the huge stockpile of felt I keep adding to!