Category: Uncategorized

In 11 days a buddy and I are going to attempt the 4 state challenge on the AT. 4 states/~44 miles in less than 24 hours. I’m not sure how I ended up agreeing to this, but once committed…I’m in.

It’s going to be a bit different than any other hikes I’ve done. No camping. Light day pack for speed. And more than double the daily miles I’ve ever done.

Since making this commitment I’ve been cranking out a marathon a week on the treadmill (and finally digging into the Expanse). I’ve made a pace chart and if I max out all sections I can finish in about 18 hours. If slowest, I’ll miss the 24 window by about 20 mins.

The hardest part will be at mile 42 we will walk right by our hotel. Facing 2 miles up hill in hour 17 to 23. Good willpower test. Trip report in a few weeks.

We went out last night to Southgate revival for our first live music in more than 15 months. We saw The Avett Brothers in Lexington in fall of 2019 and The Newbees last night. It was a great start to what will hopefully be a concert filled 2021.

This weekend’s Skoolie project was getting a mount and power setup for an old cellular enabled iPad that we had sitting in a gear closet. Won’t need the cellular (will pair with my phone for data) but the gps let’s maps work so it will be a good enough solution for nav.

I must be playing the long game with this blog.  I switched over to AWS hosting to force me to see a bill for it each month. It’s not a lot, but it’s soemthing to make me honest about whether its worth it or not more than once a year.  Bills have come and been paid month after month for more than a year with obviously very little posting.  Not sure that will change a lot in this next year, but one place I am sure I won’t be doing much posting anymore is Facebook.  As of today I suspended my account.

In the 4,920 days that I had an active account I did make regular use of it. Most of that time it was a convinience or even a pleasure.  I started to have doubts 3-4 years ago.  Seeing what happened last week in Washington and realizing that a good majority of those people ended up where there were because of Facebook is the last little push I need.  Not that I feel particularly susceptible to ending up in the same place (but who does really?), but rather it’s something I can do to feel some modicum of control.  I just can’t support a platform that does that to it’s users and then turns around and destroys its competition as a scapegoat.

I am not setting up accounts anywhere else instead.  I am just going to sit it out for a while and see how “base reality” suits me.  I wrote this post mainly as a marker for when the experiment ended and also in the small hopes that it might encourage one other person to free themselves.