I may have said it a time or 20 that you would know I’ve been kidnapped by aliens the day I have a blog.

That’s how sure I was that I’d never, ever have one. Why would I? I had a newspaper column. Everything I wanted to say I could write in a column.

Past tense. My editor booted me from the Record Searchlight two-and-a-half weeks ago.

I admit I felt pretty depressed about losing my job. So my son started this blog for me, called me from the Czech Republic and said, “Get writing, mom, your blog is ready.”

Today, this baby blog is 1 week old.

Happy birthday, little blog. You’ve grown a lot from that first day, when you received more than 1,700 hits (which I thought was great), to now.

As of a half hour ago, our baby blog has received 21,484 hits and 315 comments.

I know. I can hardly believe it myself.

There’s so much I didn’t know about blogging. For one thing, I didn’t realize there was so much going on behind-the-scenes. I didn’t realize the operators (bloggers like me) were able to moderate readers’ comments, check out the stats and even learn the source of traffic.

This explains, why, when I first discovered a cooking blog called Smitten Kitchen, I could not for the life of me figure out why all the comments were so nice and civil. Before that, my only blog experience was with Redding.com, and the comments there are about as crass and horrible and uncivilized as you can imagine. (The latest zinger was from The Bug, who said something to the effect of he was glad Doni, the “white Oprah” was gone.)

Actually, I should be so lucky to be considered a white Oprah.

You might recall that I wrote a column in the Record Searchlight about how fed up I was with those upsetting online comments. I remember a conversation I had with Silas Lyons (the editor who fired me) regarding the ugly comments.

He explained something I hadn’t realized: the Record Searchlight intentionally doesn’t read all the incoming comments. That way, if the comments turn out to be libelous, the paper can plead ignorance.

“Comment? What comment? Golly, we didn’t see it. We’ll remove it immediately. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

Like that. Clever, huh?

Enough about Redding.com. Back to this blog.

The first few days, most of the comments were linked from Redding.com. Hey, thanks, Record Searchlight!

Eventually, traffic flowed from other places, like Q97 radio, Thom G.’s blog, and such search engines as Google and Yahoo. (And thanks to all of you, too.)

I’m learning as I go. It wasn’t that long ago that I learned the definition of a blog (comes from a morph of Web and log).

Meanwhile, my son, Joe, in the Czech Republic, and our Redding techie friend (who’s bashful, and wants to remain anonymous) are constructing a brand new beautiful Web site. It will have photos, and links (such as when I mentioned Moonstone Bistro recently, and its wonderful pumpkin souffle, we’ll link to its Web site). It will have categories (food blogs, opinion blogs, etc.) and I’m not even sure what other bells and whistles.

I just know it’ll be great. (I think it’s gonna be good!)

Don’t worry. It’ll have the same address. You’ll be transported there automatically. No aliens involved.