The Wanderlust is Real

From early May last year through the end of the year, I don’t think we were ever home 3 weekends in a row. There was a period in the fall that between a work trip to Denver, camping, a road trip to Roanoke, and a visit with Michelle’s dad in Florida, I went 6 straight weekends not being home. I pretty much haven’t left the house since Christmas, except for necessary errands like grocery shopping and weekend walks in the park, and I’m very much feeling the walls close in on me. Michelle says I’m pacing in the house like a caged animal. Breck and I have tickets tomorrow for Bruce Dickinson’s Spoken Word show in Raleigh. However, they aren’t checking vaccine status for that show, and the Venn diagram for metal heads and anti-vaxxers has way too much overlap for me to feel comfortable spending an evening with a couple of thousand Iron Maiden fans. So I’m writing those tickets off and staying home.

All of which is to say I’m feeling the wanderlust hard right now. I very much want to be anywhere but home. But winter travel in Virginia is kind of the worst of all worlds. It’s too cold most days for any extended outdoors activities, and there is no snow pack to power traditional wintertime activities that might be fun. Mostly it’s just cold and dry or cold and muddy.

It looks like Omicron peaked here last week, as the curves on the CDC graphs all have a steep negative slope over the last few days. Hopefully that continues right back to a community spread percentage well below 10%, so we can start to feel safe about concerts and other large gatherings again.

The cutback in social media is going well. I’ve already noticed my ability to concentrate for 5 minutes to read longer form articles has improved. What I did with Facebook is I created a couple of custom friends lists and using a FireFox plug-in I can open the profile page of everybody in the list with one click. So once a week I open a bunch of tabs with your profile pages and I can quickly catch up in less than 30 minutes. Doing it this way has made it obvious that most of you are basically not using Facebook. Or, put another way, my Facebook feed was being dominated by just a handful of you folks! Anyway, Facebook use is down to 30 minutes a week.

In other news, I got a very late arriving Christmas gift in the mail yesterday.

And finally, on my 30-minute tour of Facebook yesterday, I stumbled into the YT video below. I know I’m an old and thus don’t have my finger on the pulse of popular music, if I ever did, given my normal tastes. However, these kids are amazing. They sound like a mix of the Jackson 5, some Stevie Wonder, and other early 70s funk/soul influences with a layer of modern pop sensibilities. I’ve had their 3 albums on constantly since yesterday afternoon.