I have been punked by WordPress, the very website that hosts my blog! I run a modest little blog here. I have a faithful group of followers. I’m not breaking any records in readership, but we laugh together here.

A little backstory – WordPress puts out statistics so I can see how I’m doing (at least by viewer numbers. They don’t ask any personal questions about my general wellbeing.)  On October 28, my stats were surprisingly good considering I had not put out any content in a couple weeks. By November 1, WordPress was telling me that my stats were booming, and I was getting more traffic than usual with 69 hourly views. I had my largest “readership” ever on that day, but something seemed off. I wasn’t getting any comments. Also, when somebody new finds me, they usually look at a few different posts. These were one different post view per visitor.

Initially I was excited that my blog was booming, but we all know that if something seems too good to be true, it’s probably not true. That was the case here. AI was “reading” my blog posts. I guess they have a lot of time on their non-hands, so why not.

I asked my faithful blogging friend at www.theromanticvineyard.com if she was having any unusual activity on her blog. She was and she looked into it. (I love friends who will dig around and get an answer.) WordPress allowed AI to read its blogs and try to learn from them. I can’t imagine what they learned from my blog, but I guess even AI needs a sense of humor.

Six days later, and I’m back to my normal level of activity, so I guess I’ve been mined for all the gems that AI could find. If you find anyone out there that sounds a lot like me, ask for some identification please.

On a side note, my ever supportive and optimistic husband said that he thought I was getting bleed-over from when I posted on Facebook a poorly lit video of a bear eating from my camera/feeder in the backyard. It has 595 views so far, more than I ever have received from any blog post. So, to wrap up my story and for your viewing pleasure, I’m including the clip here for you. This happened at 4:30 one morning last week. The bear ripped the feeder off its post and then munched on bird seed for a while. You can hear him chewing. Also, I think he may be upside down in the video because some friends thought he was a pig. Nope. A pig could not have reached that high, and Mr. Bear ate a modest amount of birdseed, so nope in that vein as well. This must have been a dainty bear, because he didn’t even touch the other near-by feeders.

Speaking of big things happening around here, I am getting ready to release a new book! This one is for grown-ups! It will be out before Thanksgiving, and you know what that means! It means my Christmas shopping is done! Tune in to my next blog post for more about it and how you can get some of your Christmas shopping done, too.