Editor: I’m on Vacation

Hello, and thank you for reading.

Inside the building at 140 Elm St., where the New Canaanite office is located.

As of Friday, July 28 and through Aug. 13, I will be away on vacation.

Please send your Letters to the Editor and news tips to Dave Gurliacci at dave@darienite.com.

In addition to our regular mix of news, including from summer intern Charlie Hobbs and contributor Sarah Maddox, we’re running two series over the next two weeks.

One is a series of Q&A’s with New Canaan service organizations, and in another we’re re-running some memorable “evergreen” stories from the past 3.5 years that you may have missed, mostly local history articles.

I’m going down to South Carolina to visit my mom, Shelley, her husband Ray and their five dogs (Arnold, Maurice, Ralph, Murray and Oakley) in Myrtle Beach for a few days, and then my wife Marie and I are going somewhere with a beach and a pool—not sure where just yet, maybe Key West. (We usually wait until the last minute to get tickets, so we’re never exactly sure where we’re going until then.)

This is the third straight year that I have been able to take a vacation like this.

Reporting on New Canaan and operating this one-person business continues to be an absolute dream job for me, and I want to thank both our fabulous NewCanaanite.com advertisers and loyal readers.

Here are some numbers that back up my use of that word.

Our daily newsletter subscription list is now up to 1,600 readers, and you’re opening the newsletter at a rate of 66.5 percent and clicking through at 31.3 percent—about four times and eight times the average, respectively, for this field.

We hit an all-time single-month traffic high in May with 134,891 pageviews, then set our second-highest mark in June with 126,040.

We’re already at more than 132,000 for the month of July, so we’ll shatter that high-water mark again.

Year-over-year, traffic is up more than 12 percent YTD.

I have all my book recommendations in and in about one hour I’ll log off of New Canaanite for a time.

I’ve instructed Dave to leave in the queue any “borderline” comments, so if they’re not showing up straightaway as usual, that’s why.

Thanks again and see you in a couple of weeks.