The Good Greatsby’s One Year Blogaversary Spectacular

If you liked The Good Greatsby this past year, you should know I was barely even trying.

If you didn’t like The Good Greatsby this past year, you should know I was barely even trying.

If you’re not a good judge of quality and can’t tell whether The Good Greatsby is good or bad, but you tend to judge writing based on perceived effort, you should know I was trying my absolute hardest and would have tried even harder if my kids would have stopped asking me to spend time with them.

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Stats: I wrote 338 posts and over 200,000 words and according to Invisible Mikey, 88.4% of those posts were funny–a rate of comedy success I can live with.

Here are a couple very nice things readers wrote which I printed up on business cards and hand out at parties if someone else is getting a compliment.

From Renee at Life in the Boomer Lane:

From Renee at Lessons from Teachers and Twits and Darla at She’s a Maineiac:

And from Bizuteria Srebrna in my spam folder:

 

I appreciate the many kind words and blogging awards from readers over the past year, and although I don’t have space to mention all of them because there are so, so, so many, you should know I keep them all printed on a list under my pillow so my wife can read me compliments every night as I drift off to sleep.

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Questions:

Last week I asked readers to submit questions and I would attempt to give non-satirical answers.

More than a few readers asked what I was doing in China.

I love to be in foreign countries and learn languages, but I hate to travel. The only choice was to move to the places I wanted to see. Many years ago I made a list of all the places I wanted to live and languages I wanted to learn, and I focused my business career on finding jobs in those places. We lived in Germany for three years and now we’ve been in China for seven years. Next on the list is either Australia, Thailand, or Costa Rica. I’d like to live in Antartica but that might have to wait until the kids are gone.

Where’d I get my smoking jacket?

I have an excellent tailor who makes my shirts and suits and tells me how handsome I look in the clothes he makes me. He also complimented my wife and I on our harmonies as we sang a duet to entertain him while he worked. Using a tailor is a bit of a necessity since I’m 6’2″ and have a hard time finding shirts, cravats, and monocles in my size. Surprisingly, smoking jackets weren’t as popular as I’d anticipated and he’d never made one before, so as I explained all the different elements and chose a fabric which he tried to talk me out of, I wasn’t completely confident the end result would match my vision

The day I tried on that jacket for the first time was one of the happiest days of my life. I was so impressed as I examined the effect in the mirror, I immediately called my wife and begged her to take the rest of the day off to celebrate. She said no.

I’m thirty-three but have been married for eleven years? Was I like twenty-two when I got married?

Yes. And I have documents proving our oldest son Optimist Prime was born a full fourteen months after the wedding.

Twenty-two may seem like a young age to get married, but it was.

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I’m going to be adding some new pages during the coming week. If you hate books, you won’t want to check out the What’s Paul Reading? page. I’ll add My Trophy Room tomorrow, and Life in China on Friday. And I’ll add two new pages next week.