I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. My family and I enjoyed a nice Christmas dinner made by my daughter. She is an exceptional cook. We exchanged gifts on Christmas eve then traveled back to Indiana Christmas day to be with my in-laws.
We were able to go pick up our new puppy from the breeder a couple days ago and she has been a bundle of joy for my wife and I. Holy is eight weeks old and full of mischief. She is a multipoo, mostly white with black patches over her eyes. I would guess she will have us completely trained in a few more days.
2012 is almost behind us and it's been another fun year here on the blog. I made 270 posts for the year. That's a few short of 2011 but still not bad. So far this year there have been 1,257,914 page loads of the blog. That's up from 2011 when I had 1,240,871 page loads. We are approaching 5 million page loads since the blog opened.
There are 13,978 subscribers to the newsletter. I would like to see that number grow a lot in 2013. If you have friends who might be interested in the hobby send them our way.
We have over 3000 members in the online community forum. Of course many of those are not very active but the ones who are keep things interesting. We average 117 posts per day to the forum.The person who currently hold the top spot for being in the forum has 62 days, 11 hours and 51 minutes. If you have not registered, give it a try. There are a lot of nice people who share the same hobby. Russ is the moderator and keeps things family friendly.
I have lost track of the number of patterns that have been downloaded but it in the millions. This month set a record with 176,028 patterns downloaded. One pattern had over 34,000 downloads this month. I think that's a record also but like I said I have kind of lost track.
I want to thank all of you who visit the blog and make it fun for this old man to enjoy his hobby. I have a passion for the hobby and the people in it. My goals for the blog remain the same as they were on day one. I want to bring as many people into the hobby as I can. I want to give those people a place to visit and feel a part of the community. I want to build the largest scroll saw pattern catalog in the world.
