Day 365 Celebration 31.12.15

I’m going to consider that tonight’s New Year’s Eve fireworks are really to celebrate the successful completion of my 365 days of daily blogging. When I started out on January 1st I didn’t think it would be possible but here we are on the final day of the year and with this post I’ve actually done it.

My thanks to WordPress who two days ago sent me my 2015 Annual Report full of all sorts of interesting statistics. It begins:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

They then provided me with the posts that received the most views this past year, thanks to you all.

• 1  Weekly Photo Challenge: Today Was a Good Day : This was my first mesh gallery and included photos from our visit to Antelope Canyon. It was also one of the featured posts by Cheri for the Daily Post’s favourites for this challenge.
• 2  Both sides now…This was one of my favourite photos of the year, and clearly one of yours too.  It was of the amazing cloud formation behind The Wall Centre in Vancouver together with, appropriately enough,  Joni Mitchell singing Both Sides Now from her classic album Clouds.
• 3  Studio 365: Day 116 It is worth seeing this again to watch and listen to Maestro Donato Cabrera conducting the Las Vegas Philharmonic playing Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony in a post that I titled, for good reason, Man in Motion.
• 4  Studio 365: Day 110  After visiting Lower Antelope Canyon on Day 109, Day  110 featured photos from Upper Antelope Canyon, which included our visit to Owl Canyon and to finding that precious great horned owl feather.
• 5  Weekly Photo Challenge: Reward In response to this photo challenge from Krista who asked ” What does reward mean to you?” I posted a gallery of photos from our never-to-be-forgotten day on Machu Picchu in 2013 after trekking for six days. 

What a lovely surprise to find that the post that received the most comments this year was on Day 178, the day our beautiful granddaughter was born.

The report informed that the busiest day of the year was November 29th with 304 views. The most popular post that day was Weekly Photo Challenge: Transition which showed how my painting of Cypress Alleyway at Castello di Reschio was created.

One final set of statistics that WordPress did not provide might be of interest to you. Over the year I posted 736 photos, 223 paintings, 25 pen and ink drawings and 54 different palettes. It seems only appropriate to end this last post of the year with some of those paintings in a concluding gallery with a painting from each month of the year.

Finally, a big thank you to all of you who have been with me all year long. Your support, interest, encouragement and wonderful comments throughout the year have made it all worthwhile. Knowing you were travelling along with me made me more determined than ever to reach my goal; I couldn’t have done it without you.

I’ll finish with the words of Winston Churchill: Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. The beginning of what you might ask? All I can say is when I know the answer I’ll let you know.

Happy New Year everyone