Three weeks from this afternoon, around 4 p.m., I will be walking my Hilary down the aisle. That means, of course, that I will be shutting down the blog I have written since October.

I have posted to this thing more than 110 times, or between three and four entries a week.

In terms of traffic, truth be told, mine isn't one of the stars in The News & Observer's galaxy of blogs, although it is a source of mild amusement to me that fatherofthebride.newsobserver.com has had some 22,000 page views all told, about 21,980 more than I expected.

A chunk of those have been from my wife, Katherine, and Hilary warily checking the latest invasion of their privacy.

This wasn't my idea, by the by.

Our previous boss, Melanie Sill, the, uh, persuasive former editor of The N&O now running a sister paper out West, made me do it, because she thinks I'm funny, no accounting for taste. In literal terms, she didn't make me do it. She suggested -- quote, unquote -- that it might build some online traffic and thus be a good idea. Yeah, well, there's them 22,000 clicks since last fall, roughly two hours' newsobserver.com traffic very, very late at night.

As you might guess, neither my wife nor my daughter was taken with the prospect of a blogger in their midst. Weddings lay down stress on a household, leading to conversations framed subjunctively; you know, sentences that begin "Well, if I were you ..." or "Far be it from me ..."

Suffice it to say, subjunctively speaking, that I pledged I would be judicious about what I would put in the blog. It was also stipulated that I would not get an all-access pass. My request to attend the bridesmaids shower, for example, was nixed on the grounds of You-Must-Be-Kidding.

But, surprisingly, I did talk my way into the bridesmaids' fitting, which I came to regret, because there are places guys should not go. And topping the list is the back of David's Bridal store.

This is what I wrote in the blog in late January:

"I went shopping with my daughter and her bridesmaids for their gowns yesterday. Pause for a moment to take in that sentence.

"I can tell you that if I wasn't doing this blog, I would not be writing that sentence. ... It's not something that in the span of a geologic era that I would ask to attend. ... It would be like me asking to go to ... what's the most improbable thing I can think of ... an expedition up the south face of Annapurna. Yes. The south face of Annapurna.

"... At 4:05 p.m. on a gray afternoon ... [David's] was jammed with young women in search of apparel for proms and weddings. In the front of the store were rows of dresses. In the back of the store were dressing rooms that were fronted by full-length mirrors. ... For an hour or so, we had a fashion show. Bridesmaids would go into the dressing rooms and emerge.

"There was a lot of pulling and tugging, because the gowns fit here but didn't fit there. The bridesmaids were very candid in their self-appraisals of what was working and what wasn't, and why. To the point where I had to inch away, out of earshot, because I realized this was the sort of thing that women talk about freely among themselves and should stay among themselves."

A recap: Since I began this blog, my daughter and future son-in-law have graduated from college (December), started jobs (January), secured a marriage license (Wednesday) and closed on their home (Thursday). Late Saturday on the 7th of June, all tuckered out, I will upload my last post. It will begin something like this: "I gave Hilary away several hours ago and boy, my feet still hurt from those rental shoes."

And a few days later, I will print out the whole 120 or 125 or whatever entries so I can pull them out and look at them every now and again, and think about time's passage.