Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a time to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Ideally I would've shared my reflections on 2023 three weeks ago, at the turn of the new year. I've left this idling because it's been a challenge figuring out how to frame it. The challenge has been that my gut ( Read more... )

A gunman shot multiple people at a Chinese New Year celebration Saturday night in Monterey Park, California, a city just east of Los Angeles. 10 people died, 10 more were injured. Update, Monday afternoon: The death toll is now 11, as one of the injured died at a hospital Monday ( Read more... )

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a time to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Recently I've posted a few retrospectives about travel. That's only one part of my life. As I've mentally composed this article about everything else I've wondered what the theme would be. Like, if there's a title ( Read more... )

It's the start of a new year, and already I'm way behind. I'm way behind on blogging. Oh, it's not just stuff from the 3 days (so far) of 2023; a few of these items have been stuck in my backlog for months. I'm writing this to record my thoughts and put myself on notice of the things I want to see accomplished.

• Year-end retrospectives
  • I've already ( Read more... )

Hawk and I took a fairly low-key approach to New Year's Eve this year. We decided weeks ago not to travel. That turns out to have been a prescient decision given all the chaos with extreme weather, flight delays/cancellation, and an operational meltdown with Southwest Airlines, the carrier we likely would have traveled. Instead we visited with ( Read more... )

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel is complete for the year- I returned from Five Days in the Desert Wednesday night even though I still have a few more blogs to push out from the trip- so I can tally up my ( Read more... )

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a moment to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Recently I've posted a few retrospectives about travel. Points and elite status with airlines, hotels, and credit cards are just possessions, though, and not even very good ones at that. Now it's time for a ( Read more... )

Friday we had the day off- and weren't in Chicago for New Year's Eve- so we went hiking locally. We made a return trip to Mindego Hill in the Russian Ridge Open Space. This time we even went to the correct trailhead so we wouldn't have a hiking fail like last time.

You see, whenever something happens that stops us from doing outdoors stuff we want ( Read more... )

Happy New Year! We canceled plans at the last minute to join our friends in Chicago because of the latest Coronavirus surge but chose to celebrate in appropriate pandemic fashion.


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When we got home last night from our trip to Hawaii we chose to cancel our trip to Chicago for New Year's. We made our decision at the proverbial 11th hour; we would've left before sunrise this morning. It was a difficult decision. Here are Five Things we considered:

1) Vaccinated friends we trust
One thing that argued in favor of still going was ( Read more... )