As I wind down the workday today it amuses me to think that I'm just about done with work for the year. Today's Friday. Next week I'm taking PTO Mon-Tue, then my company has holiday recess from Wednesday (Christmas) through January 1. My next workday is Jan 2, 2025 ( 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. 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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