Sometime between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the old sitemeter counter rolled past the five hundred thousand visit point. We don’t have a real high-volume visitors to the site like some of the Pajamas Media folks out there, but we do have high-quality folks like you that read our words. So, thanks for coming around.

The college football bowl season ends next Monday with the LSU/Alabama BCS Championship game. After that, you can expect us to post more frequently than we have this past couple of weeks.

Over the next several weeks, we will be enjoying football. The last three weeks of the NFL regular season is upon us with the playoff season after that. Additionally, college football bowl season is here with three games coming up on Saturday.

Most games will be played on television during prime time. Prime time is when we usually write our blog posts, so you can expect that we will be posting sporadically until after the Superbowl in February. That will be true on the other site as well.

Too much football, family and food to blog. Have a nice day!

Taking the day off from posting. Enjoy this picture of The Damsel enjoying the view near our new home.

It has been a little over six years since we converted our old webpages to the WordPress publishing platform and started to blog. We try to have a new post up every day - some of them conservative political content, some of them about family activities and some of them posting Damsel’s photos. In fact, the first three posts from September 2005 were one of each type of post.

• My reply to Diane Feinstein’s ‘NO’ Vote on Judge Roberts
• The Famous Salvation Army Doughnut
• Damsel Sends You a Lovely Gardenia

The image at the right is the first of Damsel’s lovely flowers posted here.

Using smilies or emoticons on Wordpress® weblog sites. The table above summarizes the little graphic images available to bloggers and commenters on sites that use the Wordpress publishing platform. We. of course, have been using it for several years. Feel free to include any of these in your comments here or on the other blog. Click on the image above to enlarge.

We try to write a blog post every day, but some days are too beautiful and warm for us to be inside. So this will have to do for today since we stayed out on the patio until almost dark enjoying the 78° temperature and a couple of cool ones.

M.D. Creekmore at The Survivalist Blog – a survival blog dedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a 1,000 round case of 9mm – 124 Grain FMJ (a $200 value – donated by LuckyGunner)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.

We’re not into Twitter, but sometimes we read the latest about interesting events like the NRA Convention currently underway in Charlotte, NC. The 2A Blog Bash website has a sidebar on their web page with tweets from some of the bloggers in attendance. Use the scroll bar to view recent tweets from the convention.

We were part of the Bash at last year’s convention in Phoenix. Sadly, we’re involved in a land purchase deal here in both California and Arizona at the same time and couldn’t get away for this one. Next year, we hope we can attend again in Pittsburgh in 2011.

Last week, we contacted the proprietor of Ballseye’s Boomers, Glenn B. to see if we could arrange a get together, since we were going to be in the same area. We threw a couple of ideas back and forth, and settled on a pizza place near the RV park where we’re camping.

I found the pizza place on Google and assumed it would have an informal eating area, where we could sit to enjoy the pizza and conversation. When we got there, it turned out to be a take-out only place. Luckily, there was a little Mexican food place just across The Apache Trail. We went on over and ordered food and sat down to eat and talk.

We chatted about our Arizona adventures and various other topics. Firearms got into the discussion, but didn’t dominate. We had a nice visit. Like most of our like-minded bloggers, it was a pleasure meeting Glenn B. and we look forward to possibly meeting again.

My Canon A710IS took this image of the three of us just after coming out of the café. Click on the image for the big picture.