Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Feeling "Humble"



I’ve written mostly about recipes and a few restaurants on this blog; this is the first I’m writing about a city – an entire city – sort of… A few months back I added a “Site meter” to Lorence’s Kitchen to do some site tracking.
Site Meter

Site meter is a free, useful, though somewhat limited (with the free version) statistics counter that I look at to see how many hits this site gets each day (current average is about 16), how people are finding this site (looking for “Shrimp Etouffe”, “Stuffed Peppers” & microwave steamed broccoli among others), and where they’re connecting from. Ah, where they’re connecting from, that’s the part I’ve really been surprised about. This site has been hit by people from all around the world – not a lot of them, but enough to really impress me with the power of this intertube-net thingy. Since I started looking at the data for the last 1200 or so visitors, I’ve calculated that I’ve had visitors from 38 different countries, and 47 out of 50 states (Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming – where are you? Come take a look!) & D.C.

But one place that kept popping up on the Site Meter report over the past several weeks caught my eye, and I noticed it because of it's name: Humble, Texas.

I’m sure (ok, so I’m not sure, but I hope) that I have a few “friends” out there who stop by here on a regular basis, but this particular entry on the report just stood out to me, so I went looking for Humble. Wasn’t too hard to find, I just used my ol’ pal Google like I do whenever curiosity gets the best of me and found Humble right where I expected it – Texas.

Ok, so that’s not really funny… I had no idea where in Texas it would be. It turns out to be north east of Houston just outside their outer, outer belt. I was actually fairly close (about 30 miles away) once when I visited Houston for a software conference back in the mid 90’s (flew into Hobby, not Intercontinental). Curiosity being what it is, I went straight to their Official City of Humble website and found that it looks like a very nice place – small, with a population of about 15,000 (about the # of students that my college had), but pleasantly nice. Their website is well done with a great many locally oriented links and some very informative and interesting history on the town’s origins. I also like their Fire & EMS page, where they have some nice photos of their apparatus, including a fine photo of the first real fire apparatus purchased by the City of Humble Fire Department in 1937. Boogie’s gonna love seeing those photos…

So to my visitor from Humble, leave me a comment, say hello, tell me what you like about Lorence’s Kitchen and what I can do better. To the rest of my visitors, stop by their webpage, & stop into town on your way through. I’ll bet you get more than a few friendly “howdy’s”.

Enjoy,
Lorence

1 comment:

Joy said...

Hello Lorence... I was using the Google-Blog feature to check on names and places important to me and your blog came up when I referenced "Humble, Texas". Neat! I grew up in Humble and my family still lives there. I live about 25 miles away in a very small town called Dayton, Texas, but I am in Humble two or three times a week.

I belong to a writer's group at the Barnes & Noble in Humble. That's how I got interested in blogging and ended up finding your blog.

Humble, as a city, truly has only about 15,000 people in population but has been swallowed up and surrounded by the far NE reaches of the city of Houston. (Don't get me started on huge cities that swallow up territory they can't provide services to, in order to increase their tax base to support an inner-city that is unsupportable!)

Anyway, I write and I have a blog. Check me out sometime. I'm looking forward to reading more of YOUR blog.

http://yellowrosez.blogspot.com/

Joy