Working on the Holidays

Patriotic Cat overdoes it--just like my neighbors.

As I write this, there are screams of "Chug! Chug! Chug!" moving from the house next door. It is safe to say that there is some drinking going on next door. And I also saw one of my neighbors light fireworks in the middle of the street--the fountain type--good for you keeping it away from your completely brown yard that is just one spark away from going up in smoke.

And my thoughts overhearing the loud partying in the neighborhood:

"God, was I ever so young?"
"Gee, my wife has to work tomorrow; I hope that they shut up soon."
"I wonder if it is wrong to base the next murder victim on my neighbor." (I am working on a science fiction story and someone is about to have "an accident" involving an airlock.
And "I am really glad that I am not working at some burger flipping job tonight--all these drunks would insist on coming though my drive-thur."

For the record, I do not miss working at a restaurant and dealing with customers on a holiday, especially drunk customers. And I used to deal with more than my fair share every holiday that involved alcohol.

(I am hard pressed to think of a single holiday that does not involve drinking.)

And who gets to work on the drinking holidays? Yes, that is right--the poorest Americans. One way to guarantee that you are working tonight and dealing with the drunks is to make minimum wage.

I don't miss it at all.

Does anyone read blogs on the Fourth of July?

Happy Fourth of July says a cat draped in American flags.

One of the things that I always wonder about is how many people actually read blogs on the Fourth of July. Or any other holiday for that matter.

I know that I do, but that because reading blogs is a combination hobby/profession to me. After all, I am a writer that blogs--I have to keep up if something happens on the Fourth of July.

But I am not so sure that anyone else reads holiday blogs. Well, at least on the holiday itself. I know that I get a certain amount of traffic on my other blogs from the search engines (Google mainly) hitting on past holiday entries. For instance, I will get a spike around Halloween on my various Halloween entries from past years.

Of course, I have a secondary reason for writing this entry this time around. I am currently doing the Ultimate Blog Challenge. During the UBC, one writes thirty-one blog posts in thirty-one days. On one level, it reminds me of the challenge of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and its summer camp version, Camp NaNoWriMo. During the NaNoWriMo, you are trying to write a fifty thousand word rough draft of a novel in thirty days. Compared to NaNoWriMo, the Ultimate Blog Challenge is (so far) low key...I am not sure if that is going to let...I might start running out of things to blog about.

I guess now is as good as time to ask people to wish me luck in finishing the UBC.

And come back later to see my stats:

People who read this entry during the July 4th holiday (remember it is also the UBC): ###

People who read this entry during the first month it was up: ###

All time readers of this entry: ###

Things I wrote while I was not here:

I talked about how saying that you are not going to buy a certain book matters not one iota when the writer does not consider you an actual potential customer.

I reviewed (sort of) the delightfully funny book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), by Jenny Lawson.