The headline is a figure of speech. We haven’t really gone to Mars.

We did manage to crack the 100,000-view mark, though–122,005 views during 2019, an increase of 23,000 and change over last year. That excited me, but I have to admit that that’s a pretty boring sentence. If I read a bunch of numbers, my eyes start to glaze over.

Last year we averaged 269 views a day; this year, 334.

(“Stop that!” Byron the Quokka shouts from offstage. “Nobody comes here to read a bunch of numbers!”)

Well, I just wanted you all to know that, thanks to you, this blog is doing well. WordPress used to do these year-in-review pieces for us, but they don’t anymore. They also used to have this nice little falling-snow-effect around Christmastime. They got rid of it two years ago. I always liked it, although one of my readers, the first time she saw it, thought there was something expensively wrong with her computer. I asked a WordPress engineer if he could reinstate the effect. He said, “You can get it back, but you’ll have to do it yourself. All you have to do is write some simple code…”

Belay that! The last time I was even suspected of writing code–and it would have had to be by accident–I wound up with light-blue print on a light-grey background. Some of you might remember that–wasn’t it awful? I mean, it was just about impossible to read! You could go blind, trying. Somehow my tech support expert at Chalcedon, Jill, restored it to normalcy. So, no code! And sorry, no falling snow on the home page.

Well, so much for my year-in-review report. See you later with a cat or dog video.