Yes, we have zinged right into April with Easter Sunday! A beautiful beginning to the month.
If the ground is no longer frozen, you know I’ll be grabbing my shovel and turning some dirt in the hope I can get my garden in before the end of April. I already have a few little seeds sprouting in my indoor starter tray. Hopefully, these will do better than last year. And last year? Remember I started the Fairy Garden that we alternatively call (depending on weather) “the Swamp.” I am currently waiting to see what survived and my heart is beginning to sink–I don’t think any of the ferns or Lilly of the Valley made it through the winter. Butterfly bush? History. But I’ve attained some satisfaction in digging out more reeds, snags, and trunks making way for slightly larger bushes than those $5 budget plants. If it’s sunny, I’ll probably be outdoors, at least until all plants are established.
I’ve confessed before to being a stats watcher (as I’ve set several goals) and was thrilled to announce the coming of my first 1,000th follower. I’ve been steadily building on that number and by Wednesday, the 28th of March had attained 1106 followers, looking forward to 1200. Then Thursday, the big crash happened and now the view counter is showing 999. How do you lose 107 followers overnight? But wait! There’s more..no really! Looking at my monthly totals, the blog achieved 1.0k views for the month of March. Hazzah! In fact, the first quarter of 2018 showed a significant jump in views. So I’m at a loss for the loss.
My February Recap noted that I was going to participate in Cathy‘s “Reading Ireland” Challenge. They were Shadow of a Century by Jean Grainger, Irish author, and another titled For the Love of Ireland by Judy Leslie and you’ll find both of those in the linked list below.
Eight new titles read and reviewed in March:
For the Love of Ireland – #BookReview
The True Tales of the Road to Key West – a #BookReview
Shadow of a Century – a #BookReview
Fiction Can Be Murder – a #BookReview
Dark Territory – a #BookReview
That intrepid associate reviewer, the CE, reviewed three titles for me in March.
The Telltale Tattoo – a #BookReview
The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle – a #BookReview
Illinois Native Americans – a #BookReview
Check out my Easter week #TBR, cozy mysteries. In the meantime, I’ve added a book tour from Sage’s Blog Tours, an author request, and I won a beautiful hardback book titled Claws for Concern by Miranda James from Lori at Escape With Dollycas. Boy does it seem strange to hold a “real” book again! Thank you, Lori!
I so enjoy and appreciate my new followers and the ones who continue to read and comment! ©2018 V Williams 
Rosepoint Publishing 
How odd about the disappearing followers – and annoying! WordPress is great, but there do seem to be an awful lot of glitches from time to time. Hope it gets resolved soon…
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Thank you–and this came in 3 hrs ago. I’ve had a number of them all day, likes and comments–but not one more view this evening as I had this morning? Something is really going whacky.
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Happy April.
Congrats on the blogging milestones…. and I have no idea how the followers appear and disappear like that 😳
I hope you enjoy your gardening, even if it sounds like you’ll be replanting some stuff from last year.
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I love gardening. But what is also disconcerting about the number loss is that I’m no longer getting the notifications from those I follow. I have to go to their blogs to see posts, including yours.
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That is annoying.
Some days I get notifications from those I follow and other days nothing. Any time my inbox is looking emptyish I can guarantee it’s lack of notifications coming jn.
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Exactly! No notifications for posts, only direct comments.
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Yup
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Could just be something as simple as WordPress doing a bit of a clean-up and removing accounts. I try not to pay too much attention to statistics. It always makes me wonder why they’re going up so slowly as if I’m doing something wrong 😄
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Yes thank you, I considered that. Inactive accts. But I’ve also lost notifications from active followers. VERY annoying!
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There seem to be quite a few issues lately. Hopefully everything will be restored and working properly again soon.
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Yes, hope so! I’ve written the”happiness engineers” about the issue but they don’t usually resolve the problem. Guess it’s just to register the complaint.
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