It was 4 a.m. this morning when my weimaraner woke me up by scratching repeatedly on the closed bedroom door (turned out he had to go outside to take care of business) that my mind began racing.

Along with being annoyed with lost sleep, I started thinking about wedlok.com — one of my new toys. I wondered how many people had been married in Las Vegas over the years.

I thought the best way to figure out how many Vegas marriages there have been would be to look up the number of marriage license applications. My research yielded some interesting statistics (source: Clark County, Nevada’s website).

In 1985, there were a little more than 59,400 licenses issued. 10 years later, in 1995, there were nearly 102,000. And last year tops out at just about 130,000.

Now I’m no statistician, but in 20 years, Vegas went from marrying about 5,000 couples a month to about 10,830 couples a month. Now multiply that by the current $55 marriage license application fee. Viva Las Vegas!