I’m open for advice. 

Female Offspring Unit #2, a.k.a. G-girl, turned 16 back in August—upping my inventory of licensed-drivers-in-household to four. Regrettably, I only have three vehicles. The mathematics of this situation is pretty harsh.

It means we’re all playing an ongoing game of musical chairs cars. (When the music stops, everyone grabs a vehicle but one person is always left without keys.) And it’s about to get worse.

You see, the lease is up on my vehicle this week (I use the word “my” with several layers of irony) and I’m done with leasing. In fact, we are working on eliminating all debt except the real estate variety and I’d like to pay cash for my cars from here on out. (Darn you Dave Ramsey!) That means we’re about to have only two cars. And that means that game of musical chairs could turn ugly.

Female Offspring Unit #1 is at college and can get by without a car for a few more months. That means I need to scrape together some cash to buy a car now. And then scrape some more together to buy another in a few months. One for me. One for G-girl.

Now don’t laugh, but I’m looking to spend about $5k for G’s car and then perhaps go mid-life-crisis-wild and drop $7k on mine. Heck, I might splurge and drop $7,500 on something if I’m feeling frisky.

For FOU #2 I’m looking for reliable, safe transportation that won’t do too much damage to her image. Gas mileage? Don’t care. She won’t put enough miles on the thing for it to matter. Carbon footprint? Let’s make Godzilla jealous.

For me, well I’d like to have one of these but I don’t think my four-figure budget is going to shake one of those loose. So, I’m looking at ’99 Volvo S70s like this one and older Mazda Millenia. These cars are modest enough to avoid the dreaded ostentatiousness but nice enough to prevent a rush of shame every time I need to have it valet parked. In other words, the perfect car for a blogger whose rambling posts on aircraft attract 38-second views from people all over the world. That’s what I’m thinking anyway.

But I’m open for suggestions.

Oh, by the way, FOU #3 turns 16 in 21 months.

Embedded in the code of this happy little blog is a utility called “Google Analytics.” It gives me the ability to view reports on how many visitors have stopped by, how long they stayed, and, if those visitors came via a link from another site or search engine it allows me to know which one.

On a typical day, I get only 30-40 visitors to this site. (Of these, 10 are usually relatives. 10 others are friends–old and new. And the remainder appear to be either long-term inmates of Flurgendorf Prison or students at the University of Blaupunkt.)

 Well, a few days ago I checked my site traffic report and discovered a huge spike in visits on October 25th. More than 250 “unique visitors” had stopped by on that one day. Needless to say, I was curious as to why so many people had suddenly stopped by, and who/what had sent them. My assumption was that some popular blog had linked to one of my recent posts.

Upon futher investigation, I learned that nearly all of the new visitors had bypassed the home page of this blog and gone directly to a post I had written way back in July. It was, this one, in which I opined about the new Boeing 787 commercial aircraft.

That wasn’t all that surprising. I still assumed some busy blog had found that post interesting or relevant and decided to link to it, thereby sending a flurry of traffic to that page on my site. But then I checked to see what site had referred all that traffic.

As it turned out, the hits did not come from a single site but rather from eight different-but-related sites. Specifically, each hit had been a result of a Google image search in various countries. The referring sites broke down as follows:

67 visitors from images.google.pl (Poland)

60 visitors from images.google.fi (Finland)

57 visitors from images.google.dk (Denmark)

48 visitors from images.google.com (USA)

30 visitors from images.google.ro (Romania)

15 visitors from images.google.id (Indonesia)

5 visitors from images.google.uk (Great Britain)

4 visitors from images.google.ar (Argentina)

Plus a scattering from Russia, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovak Republic, Brazil, and Turkey. 

Is it just me or is this exceedingly odd? If I am interpreting the reports accurately, Scores of people on four continents all decided to do a Google image search that led them to link to an old post of mine containing a picture of Boeing’s new 787 and Airbus’s new Leviathan-garganto-liner A380. On the same day.

Really?

Did the guys at the NSA who are supposed to be monitoring bad guy activity on the Internets take notice of this? I sure hope so. It’s creepy.

I suppose some international financial publication might have run some big story on that day that prompted people all over the planet to do an image search using an unusual set of search terms that caused my little blog’s post to turn up high in the results. 

If you, dear reader, have an insight as to what might explain this, I’d love to hear it.

I returned from Nashville yesterday (and head for Houston today).

In Nashville we were recording some radio programs for a ministry client and, in addition to working behind the scenes on the content of the program, I play a wee role onthe program as well—meaning I spend a little time behind a microphone. Talking. (Those readers who know me from way back will remember that in the latter part of the Cretaceous Period I made my living talking on the wireless after my meteoric career as a newspaper guy.)

Trips like that one give me the ability to affect my best Barney Fife, hike up my pants, take a deep breath and then speak-groan: “Yep…had to go to Nashville to do a recording session…Yeah…In a studio. There in Nashville…you know… recording…yep…Had to do a session. . .in Nashville.”