Hotel rooms occupied: 13
Flights taken: 19
Rental cars driven: 3
Roughly estimated number of book events: 21
Attendees at first Barnes & Noble event: 5
Attendees at second Barnes & Noble event: 125
Total pounds of butter churned at book events: about 4
Percentage of above flushed down hotel room toilets: 20
Estimated number of times Chris had to carry the butter churn to or from the car: 8
Public churning failures, attributed either to the half & half instead of cream or to improperly sealed container: 2
Pieces of storeboughten candy distributed at book events (approximately): 450
Instances in which I trekked down to WBEZ studios to remotely record content for public radio: 4
Instances in which I had to conduct a live radio interview via cell phone in a NYC cab stuck in traffic on the Willamsburg Bridge: 1
Words in The Wilder Life, not including front and back matter: 98,547
Words in The Wilder Life that are legally considered profanity, according to FCC guidelines: 3
Words in The Wilder Life legally considered profanity occuring in a quote attributed to Michael Landon: 1
Written complaints about “excessive profanity” in The Wilder Life, either by Amazon reviews or handwritten letters: 3
Highest Amazon sales rank: 104
Books ordered for relatives in fruitless attempt to bump sales rank into coveted top 100: 2
Seconds the animatronic figure of William Clark at the Museum of Western Expansion in St. Louis spends twitching: 25
YA manuscripts considered at day job: 41
Yards of bubble wrap accompanying wedding presents, estimated: 25
Minor finger injuries sustained while making brooch bouquet: 7,200
People who misheard the phrase “brooch bouquet” as “roach bouquet”: 5
People at our wedding who asked us, “Wow, who’s that guy with the kilt?” (It was Eben!): 8
Requests I have made to my husband to sing like Gordon Lightfoot: 11
Hours of delight this video, involving weird perspective and a very tiny complimentary soap in our hotel room in Minneapolis, has brought our household: MILLIONS:
I’ll stop here because I don’t think I could make a list long enough to convey what an incredible year 2011 has been.
And here’s to 2012—”this is now,” as they say, and may your now be a happy one.