Thanks a million. Almost.

Before I got my beloved Mini¹, I used to drive a Toyota Corolla. We bought it used, but only slightly used. It had only about 35,000 miles on it, and was only a couple of years old. It was a great car. Almost totally unremarkable, with its 4 doors and gray-blue paint, you’d see cars just like it every day. It was barebones: no bells or whistles (it did have a horn), nondescript upholstery, casette player, manual roll-up windows. But that car got really amazing mileage. Typically 36 miles to the gallon. It was very reliable, not counting a couple of incidents with dud alternators. I loved that car.

I remember the day it rolled over to 100,000 miles. Well, I remember noting at some point that it was going to do so that day, and then later that day noticing that it had. I missed the actual moment of rollover. Probably because I was driving.

Would you believe that this blog is getting quite close to rolling over on the odometer? At some point soon, almost certainly this month, it will break a million pageviews. Quite remarkable for a little not-quite-six-year-old blog with a fairly small number of regular readers.

I’m hoping to catch the roll-over, and I wondered if anyone out there wanted to play a game with me to guess what day. As of right now, at 9:46 p.m. on Monday, September 3rd, the pageviews are at 994,985. (You can check what they are yourself, as I have the pageviews in my sidebar. Just scroll down a bit to see the section called “blog stats.” Unless you are reading this on a mobile version, in which case, I don’t know if you can see it.)

To help you estimate how quickly the roll-over will come, here are some details about my pageviews:

• I tend to get between 200 and 400 pageviews a day (mind you, these are WordPress pageviews, not unique visitors. So if someone clicks on a few pages, it counts as a few pageviews)
• An average weekday gets typically somewhere over 300, and weekends tend to be lower

Here are some screenshots of my blog stats from a few days ago. (I noticed that my pageviews were at 993,333, and I liked that number)

Pageviews by day:

Pageviews by week:

Pageviews by month:

(As you can see, things have slowed down in the last couple of years. This is probably partly due to people reading blogs less, but also because Google doesn’t seem to like me as much anymore. Maybe because I stopped sending it flowers?)

I did a lazy calculation, and estimating that I’ll continue to get around 300 pageviews a day, the remaining 5000 or pageviews should take a bit over 16 days. So that would put us around September 20th. I’m going to guess noon on September 20th for the rollover.

So, does anyone else want to play? Guess the day (and a time, too, if you like) that my blog will hit 1,000,000 pageviews. Whoever gets closest will win a choice of one of the following:

• An original crayon doodle in the style of my blog header created by me
• An original haiku created by me
• An original dust bunny created by my extraordinarily subpar housekeeping skills
• A walk-in appearance in my next novel. (I’ve never written a novel. But I might some day, and you’d totally get to be in it.)
• A walk-in appearance in my dissertation, should I ever actually write one. (Expect delayed gratification. Very delayed.²)
• A post here on the topic of your choosing
• A surprise, chosen by me³

—
¹ Did I ever mention that I had a Mini Cooper? Before I had a baby, I called it my baby.
² Very, very delayed.
³ Really I have no idea what this would be, so I would get to be surprised, too.⁴
⁴ It will almost definitely not be one million dollars. But I was really tempted to write that in as a prize, because I hear it in my head now, as spoken by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.