What do I know about penguins?

By Anne Chudobiak

My blogging hiatus was supposed to end last week, but instead I hopped a plane for Vancouver, home to Stanley Park, Science World and beachfront properties shaped like giant hypodermic needles (pictured above). But I like to think that this trip was in the spirit of blogging.

I got to meet up again with co-blogger Tamara Lee. We caught up over veggie Chinese on Robson. I don’t know if it was the pot stickers or the conversation, but I left with a renewed resolved to start posting again, a resolve that was bolstered when I got home to find a message from Quebec Writers’ Federation friend, Matthew Anderson, asking if he could link to our blog. “I can’t let him link to something semi-defunct,” I thought. “Surely Mathew’s spillover audience deserves more regularly updated content!”

To get my blogging bearings, I checked in with my old friend, StatCounter, a handy device which tracks visits to this site. I used to be fanatical about our stats, but this year I had entirely lost interest. I was shocked this time to see that while I was hiking up Grouse in B.C., someone in Arkansas had been searching for me, or more precisely, “anne chudobiak penguin,” a query that returns several pages of hits. Was any of them what my mystery Ozarkian was looking for? All I know is that this was enough to compel me fully back into my weird virtual world. If someone in Arkansas is looking for me, I want to know.