The Minnesota Farm Woman

Any of us who surf the internet know that you can get some strange results by typing a few words into your search engine.  Try “googling” your own name, for example, and see what comes up. Googling my name will get you the website of a tall blonde stripper. It would make a really funny story if the “real” person behind the picture of the old Farm Woman WAS in fact a 33-year-old exotic dancer, but believe me, that is not the case. Honestly.  (Those of you who know me can stop laughing any time now!)  One of the really fun things about having your own website is that you can get all kinds of statistics.  Some of them are rather important, such as the daily number of page views.  Some are rather interesting, such as how many followers you have, which countries they are from, and even which language they speak. My favorite statistic of all is the top searches information, or what words people typed into their search engine to find The Minnesota Farm Woman, or maybe they found The Minnesota Farm Woman by mistake while searching for something else.  A good example of this one would be the person who typed the words “in my furnace the flame sputters and clicks” and got me. I’m sure they were very disappointed to learn that I can hardly start a fire even if I’m freezing my toenails off, but that has little to do with furnaces.  There are plenty of gardening searches such as “why is my pumpkin warty?” or “Connecticut field pumpkins fed to hogs” that brought them to my web site, but I wonder why the internet would direct a person  who was looking for “stealing plants from nursery” to me?  I have never stolen a plant in my entire life unless you count the kohlrabi we kids used to swipe out of my dad’s garden and peel with our pocketknives. I think that technically wasn’t considered stealing since he KNEW we were taking them and it was a tricky way to get us to eat more vegetables.  There are lots of searches for my mom’s Never Fail Chocolate Cake recipe (let’s hope the 100+ people found the recipe with the right amount of flour) and plenty of searches for rutabagas, rutabeggies, rooterbeggers, and rutabaga fritters. How about tomatoes? They are my favorite vegetable to grow, and I write about them a lot, but why would searches for “tomatoes 2011 mn why so bad”, “tomatoes making me sick” and “cherry tomatoes make me throw up” get directed to my web site? One little difficult pregnancy story, and I become the internet go-to-girl on nausea. It is refreshing to know there are others like me, such as “haven’t balanced checkbook in years”, and those that must have read at least one post and want to find the blog again who are searching for “rooster sitting on eggs”, and “sweet dreams Minnesota”. Oh, and I’ve seen Minnesota spelled at least seven different ways.  There are a few strange searches, though, and they leave me scratching my head.  Someone searched for “pictures of wolves at front door on cold winter nights” and got The Minnesota Farm Woman. Someone typed in “farm women getin’ dirty” and got The Minnesota Farm Woman. I’m not even going to mention the underwear in Minnesota search. This week, though, was the strangest of all. Someone did a search  for “hairy farmwomen”.  I guess I must have been the hairiest Farm Woman the world-wide web could find.

http://www.themnfarmwoman.com