Why am i blogging at 2 am?

Today was a wacky day---I taught in the morning, and then drove 3 1/2 hours up to Dee-Cee as a colleague was giving a lecture for the Supreme Court Historical Society, up at the Court. Mega-cool. Went out for dinner afterwards with a bunch of colleagues, drove around Capitol Hill for 45 minutes dropping a colleague from Maryland off at her car, and then drove the 2 1/2 hours home. It was the coolest driving experience in DC--I came down Constitution Avenue past the Capitol, and the street was empty. As I crested the hill, the traffic lights, which were red, slowly cascaded green, like dominos falling. It was cool. I drove from Capitol Hill to Virginia without hitting a red light.

I was wired up driving from drinking Bark's Root Beer and chewing Juicy Fruit---when I have to drive alone late at night I favor a large chaw of the Juicy Fruit, like five or six sticks at once. That, plus the rolled down window, and the NCAA finals cranking out of an AM station in Raliegh Durham, fading in and out as I rolled through the hills and dales of the Piedmont. Many deer, although none in the road, plus one big old bear eating at the side of the road. Big. Old. Bear. The last 45 minutes of the drive was spent listening to AC/DC "Back in Black," side two. Although, if it's on a CD, is it really side two? Somehow, "tracks 6-12" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "side two," but then I'm just a feckless romantic luddite that way, I guess.

Yikes.

Anyhoo, I'm beginning to get sleepy, so that's it for me tonight. I'm going to sleep (relatively) in tomorrow morning, and I've got a full day of chores and work, but perhaps some blogging midday.

Of the many benefits of having a co-blogger (and there are truly many of them), one of the best is that we seem to have developed a nice flow---when one of us is exceptionally busy or on vacation, or doesn't have much to say, the other is usually tucking into a nice blogging jag. The net result is that the whole enterprise not only remains to be fun, but has gotten more fun as time passes. It's a nice outlet, to be perfectly honest, and I think I can speak for Rob here that we are just tickled pink that we have developed a steady readership. For some reason that I can't trace to any one source, our traffic has steadily increased over the last month, to where a large core of our readers seem to come from bookmarks they've placed on their browsers, rather than from other blogs. We appreciate all your comments, and the regular banter and correspondence we've struck up with quite a number of you. So thanks for making the LLamabutchers such a fun thing to come home to. We've been working on some ideas for new features for the summer (I'd like to launch a Carnival of the Gardeners, keyed for both flowers and veggies), and I'm fixing to learn me some Flash Macromedia too. So we'll see.

In the meantime, we'll just keep following our motto: "Lighten up, Francis." Heaven fortend if we ever turn into the Mister Hands of the blogosphere.

See you tomorrow!