27 years of posting words on the WWW

This silly website is closer to 30 than 20 years old (27 years old on 12/31 to be exact.) It’s 2nd only to my marriage in things I’ve stuck with for a long time. I tried projects and commitments before settling on things in that previous sentence. Projects felt too casual to describe my marriage, and commitments felt too serious to describe this silly website. Things is equally offensive to both, so it wins.

2022 was a lot like 2021 which was a lot like 2020. We did our longest trip to date, 13 days to Boston and Maine, although we were not camping the entire time as we stayed with family in Boston. Acadia National Park is a magical place. In the Spring, we spent 10 nights exploring Western NY. We also spent some time with friends camping over the July 4 weekend, and road tripped back to Purdue for Michelle’s sorority reunion and a football game.

In 2023, we are planning to camp our way north on the Natchez Parkway from Natchez MS to Nashville in the Spring, and in the fall we are thinking about flying to Vegas to rent a camper van to explore the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park. I should probably get busy planning the Natchez trip, as mid-April is not that far away.

COVID finally caught up to us in late July as the entire house got tagged with generally mild cases. It was almost a relief to finally get it, as somehow never catching it seems so damn unlikely. I know it sucks for immunocompromised people (I live with one!), but locking ourselves inside and living off of Door Dash doesn’t feel like a reasonable way to live either. After a summer and fall of relative carefree living, we are back to masking up when entering the indoor public sphere, although that is really more for Flu than COVID at this point. It didn’t really work though, with Michelle working in daycare she brought flu home to us anyway. The flu vaccine worked great for me, knocking the flu symptoms down in one day. Michelle’s flu symptoms have been worse than her COVID symptoms. I suspect this is the new normal in the US, with winter outbreaks of COVID and whatever else forcing behavior changes among the reasonable minority in the US, at least during the winter months.

This is my 58th blog post of the year. If you had asked me 20 minutes ago, just before I counted, I would have guessed about 35 posts. And I didn’t even need a post-every-day-of-December gimmick to get here! I also read 48 books this year.

So what is happening for me in 2023? More real life, less doom scrolling. I’ve picked up my ukulele again. It’s been about 7 years, so I literally am starting over at beginner lesson 1 on how to tune a ukulele. It’s only a matter of time until I start posting poorly done covers of 80s metal tunes on YouTube. Also, my calories consumed to calories burnt ratio has gotten out of whack, so I need to focus on that again too. I need to focus on that all the time, as when I stop focusing on it, I start eating more and exercising less. If there is a genie reading this that owes me a wish or two, I’d like my 1980s metabolism and hair back, in that order of preference, please.

And that is a wrap on 2022. It was better than 2021 or 2020, so I guess we got that going for us. Here’s hoping 2023 is a return to normalcy. But I wouldn’t bet on it.