A to Z Challenge 2024

2024 A2Z Challenge — Reflections

Fandango20 Comments

I unofficially participated in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year was girlfriends.

Recap

Let me start out by saying that April 2024 was my worst April in terms of overall views since my very first April on this blog in 2018. I received 8.7 thousand views last month, as compared with 4.6 thousand views in April 2018. And what is worse, my April views from 2019 to 2023 were between 12.3 to 15.4 thousand a month! So I’ve fallen pretty far. Also, in April 2024, my blog had the least monthly views since December 2023.

Of my 8,707 views last month, my A2Z posts accounted for 922 views, an average of 35.5 views per day (for the 26 days). My A2Z posts received 493 likes (about 19 a day on average) and 519 comments (about 20 per day on average). Of course, probably close to half of those comments were mine.

It seems that fatigue at reading about my dating exploits in the 1960s and 1970s set in by the time we got to the last letters of the alphabet. Views, likes, and comments fell off dramatically in the last five letters of the alphabet than in the first five. I guess people can take only so many stories about one young man’s sexual misadventures in a single month.

But it may also be that my blog’s stats in general are way down. Stating in June 2018, my blog received at least 10,000 views a month — typically 12-16,000 or more a month — for 63 consecutive months through August 2023. But since September 2023, my blog’s monthly total views have been less than 10,000. So perhaps it’s Fandango fatigue.

Some factoids for this year’s A2Z Challenge:

Posts with most views:

  1. Barbara (56)
  2. Alvis (53)
  3. Quinn (45)

Posts with most likes

  1. Barbara (27)
  2. Mrs. Fandango (27)
  3. Irene (24)

Posts with most comments

  1. Mrs. Fandango (38)
  2. Barbara (37)
  3. Tie: Alvis and Eileen (33)

All that said, I will probably do A2Z again next April, but I will choose my theme more wisely.

Anyway, if you’re really bored, here are all of my 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A2Z Challenge — The Letter Z

Fandango10 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends. I can not believe we’ve reached the end of April and the end of the alphabet already!

Z is for Zoey H.

When I completed my active duty as an army medic, I continued my military service as a “weekend warrior” in the army reserves. I would spend one weekend a month assigned to a psychiatric ward at the Walter Reed Hospital caring for a lot of soldiers back from Vietnam suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric issues.

In civilian life I grew my hair too long to be able to show up for my monthly reserve duty, so had to make some choices. I could either get a monthly haircut that would pass military hair requirements or I could buy a men’s wig and use bobby pins to hold my long hair in place while I put a short cut men’s wig — not a toupee but a whole head wig — over my hair.

I honestly didn’t know if my wig was fooling anybody, but nobody said anything to me when I reported for duty.

Anyway, there was a cute military nurse named Zoey who worked on the psych ward and she would occasionally be on duty the same weekends that I was pulling my monthly gig. The first time I was on the ward when she was there we chatted a little bit and she was very nice to be around. She wasn’t there the next two monthly reserve weekends I worked, but she was there the following time I pulled duty.

She remembered me, said hi, and then gave me a strange look. “Are you wearing a wig?” she asked. Then she reached up and pushed some long hairs that had apparently escaped the confines of my wig back up underneath the wig. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

A few hours later she saw me again and ordered me to follow her into a storage room. “Take it off,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Your wig,” she clarified. “Take it off because you have a lot of hair sticking out from under it.” I look off my wig to reveal a head of thick wavy hair beneath it. She took a minute before reacting, but then she started running her fingers through my hair and said, “Oh, this makes me hot,” and she started kissing me. I said she had to stop because I needed to be on the ward, and she gave me one more kiss and then expertly used the bobby pins to secure my real hair tightly to my head and then put the wig back on my head. She then stood back and said, “Much better,” and then patted me on my ass as I was leaving the storage room.

That was Saturday. I was back on Sunday and so was Zoey. This time I had done a better job putting on my wig and I was confident that no long hairs were sticking out from under my wig. Zoey was very friendly again, but we focused on doing our respective jobs.

Until mid-afternoon when Zoey came up to me and asked if I could give her a hand in the storage room. After we were in the storage room she closed and locked the door and literally ripped the wig off of my head and started running her hands through my hair while kissing me passionately on the mouth. Then she stopped, got down on her knees, unhooked my belt, unbuttoned my fly, pulled down my underpants and….

Afterwards she spent a few minutes getting my wig back in place.

For my next two monthly weekends at Walter Reed, Zoey made sure she was working those weekends, too, and our encounters in the storage room had evolved to having sex on both Saturdays and Sundays. And she always made sure my wig looked perfect afterwards.

The next weekend I went to Walter Reed, Zoey was not there. I asked another nurse if she knew if Zoey would be coming in. The nurse gave me a knowing look and said that Zoey had transferred to a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Then she added, “Yes, her husband who was a doctor here at Walter Reed, got transferred to that hospital, and as his wife, she of course, went with him to Germany.” The nurse emphasized the word “wife.”

I had no idea that Zoey was married, much less to an army doctor at Walter Reed!

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y

A2Z Challenge — The Letter Y

Fandango3 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

Y is for Yvonne J.

I got promoted to the position of Hospital Relations Representative, and that job entailed my meeting regularly with people like the head of financial management (often called the Controller) at a hospital, the head of patient accounting, or the hospital administrators. My role was to make sure that the hospitals I was assigned to and my company, a Blue Cross plan, worked together to meet the needs of their patients and their financial targets.

Most of the hospital administrators and hospital controllers were male, and many of the patient accounts managers were female. Yvonne was the patient accounts manager for the largest hospital I was assigned to, so I typically had meetings with her at her hospital at least once weekly.

Our relationship had been strictly professional until one day a few months after I was promoted into my new role. Yvonne called me up to tell me that she was all booked up that morning, but said she was free for lunch. I didn’t give it too much thought because many of my contacts had busy schedules and we would occasionally have meetings over sandwiches at lunch.

Yvonne had given me the name of the restaurant where she had made lunch reservations for us. I brought my agenda of topics for us to discuss and the necessary supporting documentation. When I arrived at the restaurant, Yvonne was already there waiting for me, and when I was led to her table by the hostess, Yvonne stood up to shake my hand.

Yvonne was a pleasant-looking woman, but kind of a plain Jane. She didn’t wear much makeup at her office in the hospital and dressed in very appropriate, conservative business attire. But this woman who stood up to shake my hand was far from a plain Jane. Her Auburn hair, which she mostly wore in a tight bun, was combed out and down past her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, so I assumed she’d donned a pair of contact lenses. She was also wearing a rather form-fitting, short dress that was on the low-cut side. I actually did a double-take, which she noticed and smiled back at me.

We ordered lunch and I went through my meeting agenda. When I was done, I asked her what she had for me. “I have two tickets to see Hall & Oates on Saturday night. Would you like to go with me?”

I was a fan of Hall & Oates and had just bought their album, Abandoned Luncheonette, that previous weekend. But I explained to Yvonne, “My company has a very strict policy on accepting gifts from clients….”

Yvonne interrupted me. “This isn’t a gift,” she said. “I’m asking you out on a date.”

We went to the Hall & Oates concert, which was great, and started dating for about three months before she took a job at a different hospital in a different state. Yvonne continued to wear her hair in a tight bun, dress conservatively, and wear glasses at our business meetings, but she was like a totally different woman when we were on dates.

When Yvonne told me that she was taking a job as the chief financial officer at a hospital in Chicago, she asked me if I would consider moving to Chicago to be with her. I did give it some serious thought, but decided it really wasn’t a good idea and she needed to focus on being successful in her new role, but we could keep in touch and “you never know what might happen.”

We did keep in touch for about a month, but then I met someone new and I’d heard she’d hooked up with a ER doctor at the hospital.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X

A2Z Challenge — The Letter X

Fandango3 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

X is for Xin C.

I bet you didn’t think I had ever gone out with a girl whose name started with the letter “X,” but you’d have been wrong. Xin was a Chinese girl that I went out with for a few months during my junior year in college. She pronounced her name like Sheen, but she anglicized it to Jean to make it easier on everyone else.

Xin (or Jean) was, like me, a first-generation American and her parents raised her and her sister in a very traditional Chinese manner. I met her parents once and was surprised that, although they could understand and speak English, in their home no one did. They all spoke Chinese all the time. Xin had started kindergarten in American schools, so her English was perfect with no hint of an accent.

I met Xin in one of my classes and thought she was about the most exotic-looking young woman I’d ever seen in real life. We talked a bit in class and I found out that she was a speech and communication major with a focus on broadcast journalism, which intrigued me. I spent a lot of time asking her about her life, her major, and her future. After a few weeks we started dating and for a time it was great. We would talk for hours and hours and she was one of the most interesting and intelligent girls I’d ever gone out with and I loved the time we spent together.

We seemed to be about equally attracted to each other and the physical aspect of our relationship added a whole new and exciting dimension. However, there were limitations imposed by Xin’s heritage. She absolutely would not have sexual intercourse until she was married. We did just about everything else a couple could do sexually without going all the way, but it still, in me, anyway, left something to be desired. I was feeling unfulfilled and I know she was too. But she was immovable.

I was a junior in college and admittedly immature, so I was nowhere near even contemplating marriage. But not being able to have sex with her was driving me crazy. One night we were naked in bed. I was on top of her and we were making out, and I could easily have penetrated her, but I suddenly realized that if I had, it would be tantamount to rape, and I wouldn’t be able be able to live with myself. So I stopped, got off of her, got dressed, told Xin to get dressed, and drove her home.

Xin and I remained friendly after that, but we never went out on a real date again. She said she understood why we had to stop seeing each other, but she confessed later on that she wanted me inside of her that night as much as I wanted to be, but she was glad that I stopped before it happened.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W

A2Z Challenge — The Letter W

Fandango4 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

W is for Wendy C.

Do you remember a few days ago when I was telling you about Stopwatch Sally? Well, I met Wendy through Sally. Shortly before that incident where Sally slammed down the receiver on her telephone so hard that I was sure she must have broken the base unit of her phone, I was over at Sally’s house to pick her up for a date. When I came to the door of her house where she lived with her parents, Sally invited me in and asked me if I minded if her cousin, Wendy, could tag along.

Sally explained that Wendy’s parents were moving into a new house in the area because her father had just accepted a position as the editor of a well-known business magazine. Her parents asked Sally’s parents if Wendy could stay with them while Wendy’s parents were getting things settled in their new house.

Anyway, after I agreed to let Wendy come with us, Sally called out to Wendy, who was upstairs in Sally’s bedroom and Wendy came walking down the stairs from the second floor. She took my breath away, that’s how beautiful she was. Like Sally, she was a junior in high school, but not at the same school Sally was going to.

I know that Sally was getting pissed because I was paying so much attention to Wendy that night. Of course, I didn’t know that less than a week later Sally and I would have a big blow-up. When Sally excused herself to go to the restroom, I asked Wendy for her phone number, but she didn’t have it because the landline at her new home hadn’t been installed yet — and cell phones were still nearly half a century away from becoming ubiquitous. Wendy asked me for my phone number and promised to call me when her phone was installed.

Wendy did call me a few days after the Sally incident. “My cousin told me she dumped you,” Wendy said. I admitted to doing something I regretted and Wendy said, “If you ever were to talk about me the way you talked about Sally, I’d dump you too, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you learned your lesson.”

So Wendy and I started dating, but she was nothing like her cousin. I was only a freshman in college, but I was truly smitten and thought Wendy could be “the one.” Sure, we would make out and go at it pretty hot and heavy, but we never got past third base, even after dating her for the better part of a year.

During the summer before my sophomore year at college and her senior year in high school, her parents rented a place on the ocean at Fenwick Island in Delaware. I was invited by Wendy to spend a week there with her, her sister, and her mother. Her father had to stay behind in DC for his job at the magazine. I was sure that I was going to “consummate” our relationship during that week.

So when we had an opportunity to go all the way, we did. And it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Except, I sensed that this wasn’t her first rodeo. I asked her about that and she admitted that she’d had sex once before. She also admitted that there was a guy at her high school that she was also seeing. He was a jock, the captain of the football team and shit like that. His name was Derek.

Right after Wendy and I had sex, I told her that I loved her. She said she loved me too. Then she said, “But there is someone else I love more than you.”

“Derek?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s Derek. I’m so sorry.”

It took me a long time to get over Wendy.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V