One by One

This past weekend, I'd intended to post a new story about working for the Census. Good intentions got waylaid by this amazing wave of you all visiting my blog, thanks to Blogger putting me on the Blogs of Note list. You came, you looked around, you decided to comment, or follow. And you're still coming! For a humble blogger who had only 8 followers when she went to work on Friday, and now has over 300, this has been an awesome experience. Thank you!

What I'm trying to do with all of this is answer each and every comment to the best of my ability. Since my comments are all moderated I have to read them, delete the duplicates, and of course get rid of the spam. Don't worry, just because you put a link in your comment doesn't mean that I delete it. Lots of you are leaving me links to your blogs and I love going there and seeing what you've done. Right now there are just SO many that I'm way behind, but I'll catch up one by one.

Many of you have just started your blogs. That's where I was 3 years ago. I'd actually created my blog by mistake. I wanted to leave a comment on a friend's blog and registered to do so. Suddenly there was this blog hanging out there with nothing on it. Couldn't let that happen, so I figured out what to write for a first post, and have been blogging ever since.

So far, comments have been left from many different countries, among them Brazil, Portugal, Myanmar, Romania, Australia, and a few that don't translate into a country I can determine. I took Spanish in school, but am not very good at it. I catch about one word in ten. That helps with Spanish and Portuguese, but doesn't get me much farther than knowing whether you left a compliment or not. Talking to friends across the work table I've learned that the characters I mistook to be Greek are actually Romanian. That gave me an interesting bit of history as I didn't know the history of the Romanian language or that they apparently got their alphabet from the Greeks. Being a lover of history and words, this is fascinating to me. And I want to thank all of you from other countries who speak the English language. You are awesome. America doesn't do it's part as a member of the global community when it fails to teach its students a second language well. We do get a couple of years of training, but, as those of you fluent in more than one know, that's no where near enough. It isn't even enough for the second language learners in our public schools. I hope someday that will be corrected, but I don't know that it will happen soon.

To any new comers, if I fail to comment immediately it's because I'm still catching up. There were over 3000 visitors this weekend. However, eventually, I'll reply and pay you a return visit if you've got a blog that I can visit. And forward we go, one by one.