Frühling in Europa

It's springtime here in southern Germany (and technically all across the northern hemisphere but we're talking more feel here rather than hard dates) and the sun is shining again. More specifically than just springtime, it's also Easter-time -- meaning that holiday season is in full force. I asked Hannah if she wanted to go to Majorca, Tenerife, Lanzarote, or somewhere else for a trip and she vomited on my new jeans and then cried for an hour. I tried running that scenario through the Dunstan Baby Language but Priscilla's findings couldn't seem to translate that particular attempt at communication and so in the end we probably won't go anywhere.

It's funny how perspectives change over time. Like when you're a student and you think you don't have any time, but then you start working and you realize that you had a ton of time before and only now you *really* don't have any time. But then you have a kid and you realized that before you had all the time in the world. Or you drink a Molson Canadian and you think 'wow beer is good!' and then later on you try a Steamwhistle and you think 'hey this beer is really good!' and then finally one day you drink a real Munich beer and you realize 'wow all that other beer wasn't all that good'. Or how about you're happy that your running has come a long way and you think that it's great that you finished 10k in under 50 minutes but then a year or two later you're disappointed if you don't go under 45 minutes and then finally now if you haven't broken 40 yet then something is seriously wrong. I think you get the picture so now we can move on to the observation at hand which was that I really thought last year that I'd dropped the ball on blog post frequency but now here we are in 2016 and things are more dismal than ever. But you didn't give up, did you? Here we are now and you're reading a brand new blog post as we speak! These are exciting times. And to make things even more exciting -- especially for the demographic of GWMD readers who are into beautiful visualizations and graphs of all kinds -- please enjoy a graphical representation of GWMD post frequency over the last four years.

So the black curve shows absolute number of posts per year which -- despite an outlier in 2013 -- has been dropping every year since GWMD's inception. The blue line shows the regression line of the data which confirms the obvious drop, and the grey shaded area shows the confidence interval in the linear regression (basically if you were to predict the number of posts in 2017 it would probably lie somewhere between -5 and 30.. haha -5). Of course this isn't really a fair comparison since 2016 has only had 3 months happen so far so take all this with a grain of you-know-what.

Perhaps more interesting, then, and more fair, is a visualization of posts per month! Woo-hoo!

You'll notice some missing months recently -- noticeably zero posts in September and zero posts in November. I wonder why that might be!

Here are some things that have happened recently:

1. Due to springtime weather (see supra), Hannah visited her first [?] beer garden:

2. We ate a giant steak: 

3. My new bike arrived:

4. Hannah learned how to turn her toys into a pillow:

So does all this mean that we might be seeing a higher post frequency in the near future? Some kind of drive from the upper management at GWMD to set a commitment for a solid measurable statistically significant increase in number of posts per month and/or year that will in turn keep our customers happy and returning for more? Could this be the start of something new? Stay tuned to find out!*

* the answer is probably not. Sorry..