blogging

2015 Year in Review

Posted By: Mitch One comment
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2015 was the second year of our blog, and everyday we are continually amazed at the number of readers and visitors that stop by!  Blogging is a ton of fun work, but it’s a great way to share our experiences and stories with people around the world, and we have throughly enjoyed it.

Last year I did a post entitled 2014 Stats, where I documented the stats for our blog.  Well today, you get to read about our 2015 year in blogging.

In 2015:

  • We published 66 posts, which was only 3 more than in 2014.
  • We had over 8,300 viewers, an increase of 56.6% from last year!  That is pretty impressive since we only blogged for 6 months in 2015: January-May and September
  • We posted 360 photos, about 7 per week
  • The day with the most viewers was on April 22, when we published Amazing News!
  • Our readers came from 107 countries!

 

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  • Here is list of the countries where our viewers are reading our blog:
    • United States: 5,615
    • Kuwait: 929
    • Canada: 345
    • Brazil: 248
    • United Kingdom: 128
    • France: 59
    • United Arab Emirates: 58
    • India: 54
    • Germany: 53
    • Sri Lanka: 52
    • Italy: 52
    • Less than 50 readers:
      • China, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Bangladesh, European Union, Jordan, Russia, Egypt, Netherlands, Pakistan, Turkey, Mexico, Greece, Hong Kong, Sweden, Switzerland, Philippines, Ireland, Slovenia, South Africa, Belgium, Qatar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Japan, Chile, Tunisia, Ecuador, Norway, Singapore, Finland, Morocco, Oman, Thailand, Colombia, Lebanon, Poland, Venezuela, Argentina, Hungary, South Korea, Barbados, Peru, Austria, Croatia, New Zealand, Romania, Vietnam, Senegal, Paraguay, Israel, Denmark, Benin, Algeria, Puerto Rico, Malta, Bhutan, Ghana, Mozambique, Madagascar, Azerbaijan, Kenya, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Laos, Congo, Maldives, Angola, Luxembourg, Taiwan, Ivory Coast, Suriname, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Mongolia, Uruguay, Armenia, Bermuda, Georgia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Montenegro, Togo, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Iraq, Nigeria, St Vincent & Grenadines, and Latvia!

2015 was a great year for our family, and we are looking forward to sharing more stories and adventures with you as we transition our life from Kuwait to South Korea this year!

 

We’re Baaaaaaack!

Posted By: Mitch, , Leave a comment

Greetings Friends, Family, Followers, and Visitors!

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It’s been 3 months since we’ve blogged, and we have so much to catch up on!  The last time we posted, we had a 2 week old newborn son, Rachel was on maternity leave, and I was home on paternity leave.  Fast forward to now . . . . . . Hayden is 3.5 months old, Rachel is back to work, I’ve started a new job, and we have some exciting family news to share!!! (more on that later!)

We gave up blogging for awhile to focus on spending as much time as possible as a family.   We knew that we wanted to devote all of our free time to caring for Hayden, (and taking naps!) but now we’ve slowly developed a routine, and have a bit more free time to post every once in awhile.

Previously, we tried posting 3 times a week, however our new goal is now twice a week.  Next Monday, our weekly Happy Hour posts return (woohoo!) and we’re going to try and do one other post each week . . . . . . inshalla!

We loved receiving all of the emails asking, “where are you guys, is everything ok?”  We are totally fantastic, and life is incredibly awesome right now!  We have a beautiful-happy-healthy-smiley son, we just returned from a 23 day vacation in Thailand, and have another incredible/exciting opportunity heading our way in August!

Well everyone, we’re here . . . . . . . . . . . . . we’re baaaaaaack!

Mitch’s Monday Happy Hour – May 4

Posted By: Mitch, , Leave a comment

Happy Monday Everyone!

If we were getting together this week for Happy Hour, here’s what we would have to share:

  • It is officially getting hot here!  All of a sudden last week, as if someone flipped a switch, the heat just cranked up.  It went from the low 90s (which feels great) to temps over 100!  The good news is that we only have about a month left in Kuwait before we head back to America for the summer months.  The bad news is that it is going to get much hotter here before we leave in June!  From what I understand though, we are pretty lucky this year with the temperatures.  Typically the heat arrives at the beginning of April, so we’ve dodged it by a whole month.
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  • Due to the increased heat, we’ve had to bump our “weekend walks” to early morning strolls.  Last weekend, we left about 7:30am, and the temperatures were already at 95 degrees!  It was a bit warm, but we knew we knew that this would be the most enjoyable part of the day.  We found a nice little walkway along the beach pretty close to our apartment.  The best part about going so early, is that there was hardly anyone out-and-about at that time of day.  Our “weekend walks” are one of the most enjoyable parts of my week.  It allows us to kind of get away from everything, and just talk!  We discuss life, work, future plans, and just kind of reflect on life.
Early Bird
  • After our walk along the beach, we decided to treat ourselves for breakfast at one of our favorite little cafes here called The Early Bird.  It’s just like any cafe you would find in North America, with a menu consisting of eggs, pancakes, french toast, etc.  They have bacon and sausage too, but unfortunately it’s beef, so not as delicious as we are accustomed to.
Mtka
  • At breakfast I was wearing a t-shirt from our hometown back in Minnesota, pictured above.  While eating breakfast at the cafe, a guy at a table next to us asked me, “are you from Minnetonka?”  I was a bit surprised by the question, and responded hesitantly with a, “ya, have you heard of it?”  He smiled, and said he was from the city of Golden Valley, which borders Minnetonka!  It is such a big world out there, yet small too.  Encounters like this definitely put things into perspective.
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Photo courtesy of: tetontenkara.blogspot.com

  • Last week we published our 100th post!  While our posting has slowed down a bit the last couple of weeks, we are still dedicated to keeping this blog up to date, especially with the arrival our first baby soon!

2014 Stats

Posted By: Mitch, , View all 6 comments

We have throughly enjoyed sharing this blog with everyone, and love using WordPress.com to host it.  If anyone is considering to start a blog, we highly recommend them.  It is super easy to use, very organized, and they even keep stats for you.  They recently sent us an email containing our 2014 Annual Report. Here are a few fun facts from 2014 (September-December):

  • We posted 63 times, and had over 5,300 viewers!
  • Our busiest day was on September 24 when we posted our About Us section, it was viewed 142 times that day.
  • Here is the list of the Top 5 most viewed posts:
  1. Today
  2. Sri Lanka & the Maldives
  3. Apartment Tour
  4. Roll Call – Mitch? Here!
  5. It’s a Big World Out There, But Yet Small Too
  • Here is list of the countries where our viewers are reading our blog:
    • United States: 4,493
    • Kuwait: 297  *Hi friends!
    • Brazil: 190
    • Canada: 93
    • Germany: 30
    • Italy: 30
    • Less than 25 readers:  Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Portugal, Spain, England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Pakistan, India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand!

What started out as a small little blog that we created to keep in touch with our family and friends from back home, has now spread across the world. We would love to hear from you, so comment on a post or shoot us an email. We would love to hear from our readers, tell us what you enjoy about our blog or send us any questions or idea topics you would like us to cover.

Wherever you are located, thank you to everyone for their readership and support.  This blog has turned into a fun little hobby, and we are thrilled that you are following along with our adventure.

Cheers,
Mitch & Rachel

Follow Us

Posted By: Rachel Leave a comment

We had great intentions with our blogging schedule.  We planned on having three posts a week go up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and then life happened.

We totally failed at keeping that schedule and before we knew it long stretches of time would go by without either one of us have the time or creativity to put together a decent blog post.   We realize this can be annoying when you are checking back in with a blog only to find the same post at the top of the feed, or maybe you are the type of person who forgets to check in with a blog, only to find 68 new posts have been put up since the last time you read it!  If you are looking for a solution to either of those problems let me help you out: subscribe!  Once you are subscribed to our blog you will get an e-mail to your inbox to let you know we have something new for you to read.

If you would like to subscribe, follow these simple steps:

Step one: click on the plus sign next to “follow” in the bottom left hand corner.  See the red arrow.

follow us

 

Step two: enter your email address.  See the red arrow.

Step three: click “Sign me up” See Blue Circle.

follow us email

 

Wham bam, thank you ma’am, you are officially subscribed!

Tweet Tweet – We’re on Twitter!

Posted By: Mitch, , Leave a comment

For all of you Tweeter-dees and Tweeter-dos, The Might as Wellers are now on Twitter! You can follow us at @mightaswellers or visit our page at here. We are going to continue blogging a few times per week, but Twitter is just another great way to follow our daily adventures in Kuwait.  It’s a great way for us to share a quick photo of something cool we see, tell a funny story (in 140 characters or less), share travel advice and other awesome stuff.  Sometimes it’s easier to throw something on Twitter rather than writing up an entire post for the blog.  Soon, we’ll have a link to our Twitter page on our website, however we are still working our a few technical difficulties with the setup, but hopefully you will see it soon. If you don’t want to be a Tweeter on Twitter, you can always just be a Stalker on Twitter!  I think you still need an account though to view our Twitter page, but you can register for free here.

Roll Call – Mitch? Here!

Posted By: Mitch View all 7 comments
Since last winter, when Rachel and I decided to take on our adventure across the world one of the first things out of her mouth was, “OMG, we should start a blog!”  I’m sure the look on my face was less than pleasant and probably portrayed the image of “you’re kidding me right?”  For all of you married guys out there you are probably very familiar with the phrase of “a happy wife is a happy life.” So with that motto in mind, I jumped on board!
 
Until today I was able to find enough excuses to avoid my contributions to the blog.  Until just two weeks ago, I was working at my previous full-time job, working on projects around the house to get it sold, and all of the other “to do items” in order to prepare for our lives living overseas. However as of today, I’m about 10,000 miles away from home, in a country where I know only one person, and unemployed!  So with that being said, today is my first blog post!
 
Our initial goal with this blog was to keep our friends and families up-to-date on what we are doing, but we are slowly developing a following of readers from around there world.  Perhaps they stumbled across our blog through Google, or maybe another friend recommended it to them.  We have expanded our goal of this blog to provide the entire world with an insight into our lives.  I’m assuming most people don’t know a couple who quit both of their full time jobs, and sold their house, both cars, and over 95% of their possessions to take an adventure and experience life abroad as an expat.  We want people to know that the world is an amazing place with so many cool places. We hope to visit some of those places and put our experiences on our blog so our readers could follow along.
 
I can’t thank my wife enough for all of the hard work she has dedicated to get this blog up and running. I’m slowly finding out that it takes an enormous amount of time to develop topics, gather your thoughts, put it to paper, and attach photos, all with the hope that someone from around the world will take just a few minutes to read it. We hope to make people laugh, cry, and mostly say, “holy crap, that is so freaking awesome!”  
 
We can’t thank our readers enough for the support and love on our blog.  We have received so much positive feedback, and that’s really what keeps us going. So feel free to share our blog with others and comment with your thoughts, suggestions, questions, or other comments. I’m excited to join my wife Rachel on our adventure in Kuwait and to share our thoughts and experiences on our new blog.  
 
Cheers!

A blog?

Posted By: Rachel One comment

Buckskin Gulch, Utah We started a blog, yup I said “we.”  I wanted a blog and Mitch is hands down a better writer than I am so I persistently asked until he reluctantly agreed, politely asked him one time and he jumped on board.  Mitch and I are making a major life change and I wanted to way to document our set backs, our successes, and our adventures along the way.  So we will be writing about our life from our own individual perspectives.   My posts will be filled with misspelled words, rambling sentences, and an excessive use of ellipsis (hmm…maybe the plural is ellipsi) Mitch’s writing however will be well thought out, carefully crafted and in a logical and orderly manner.  You can go ahead and take that information and imply a whole bunch of things about our marriage and you would probably right.   So this is it, an official first post and from what I have been told, one of the hardest to write.