This is somewhat disturbing

Every once in a while I check my site stats just to see where traffic is coming from - and also to see if anyone still reads this nonsense. A couple of weeks ago Houseblogs.net picked our site up and added it to their feed so our site traffic took a little bit of a spike there and now they steadily move up the list of referring sites every time I check it. Which is very nice.

My favorite part of site stats, though, is the search query report. The majority of folks get to the site by directly entering the URL or because they subscribe to our Atom feed. Of those people, I'd say a generous majority of them are people who are either related to us or know us personally, and are therefore required to read our blog on a regular basis. Otherwise every time they ask us "Did you do anything at the house this week?" we act very hurt and reply "Didn't you read the blog?!?" and the shame and humiliation is too much for them to bear. The exception to this rule being my mom, who skims through the blog on a sporadic basis and then when I say "Well I didn't hear you laugh or anything" she'll simply reply "It was cute." Then she goes and has some popcorn and an apple. My mom hasn't eaten a french fry in over a year, by the way, and that has nothing to do with anything except that I sometimes wonder if she ate a few french fries she might find me a little more amusing. Just an idea.

For some unfortunate souls, though, my site comes up in their legitimate search queries for legitimate problems/issues/concerns they're trying to find legitimate solutions for. I apologize to those people who think they might find actual answers to how to get the dead animal smell out of their dishwasher (an alarmingly large population) and, instead, just find my wise-ass quips about sawing through countertops and why people should seriously consider HOUSETRAINING THEIR DOGS! I really don't offer any tips on how to accomplish these things, I just bring the topics up. Discuss amongst yourselves, your guess is as good as mine. Truth be told whenever I find Tom staring at a project with a puzzled look on his face the first solution I offer is always "Did you try hitting it with a hammer?" In my mind this solution is always worth a try whether we're talking about a home improvement project, a disobedient piece of office equipment or one of our cats.

What I found alarming today, though, was that the search query report had a disturbingly large volume of "human urine removal" search hits. There must not be a whole lot of us out there talking about this problem either, because I got a lot of site traffic over that one little tidbit of information from our living room carpet removal adventure. Also we've apparently stumbled onto another untapped market, the "human urine smell in chair" sector of society.

Now .. if you have a urine soaked piece of furniture I know I'm probably already late to the game. Once you're hitting Google up for remedies then you've already moved well past the only advice I have to offer on the topic - which is "Don't let people pee on your furniture". I do have to say, though, that if someone has urinated ON your furniture, that's the sort of news you need to be spreading around. Don't keep it to yourself. I'd take out an ad in the newspaper if someone peed on my chair. No lie. I can't help you with the actual chair, but I can tell you this most assuredly: If I had even third-hand knowledge that someone may or may not be in the habit of peeing on someone's furniture, then they're not going to be invited to my dinner party, you know? There's info you keep to yourself, and info you share. THIS IS THE SORT OF INFO YOU SHARE.