It's New Year's Day somewhere, right? No, wait. That only works with 5 PM. Whatever. The flu tore through our family around Christmas and yesterday was the first day I felt back to normal. In fact, yesterday was the first time I left the house for reasons other than grocery shopping or doctor visits since December 22. So my year is off to a banging start, and the Happy New Year post is a week late.

Personal blogging is back. Maybe. The shenanigans at Twitter have opened the eyes of a lot of people to why pouring your life into a corporate controlled platform is a bad idea. I've added a lot of blogs to my feed reader over the last couple of months. I don't know that blogging will ever gain the mainstream position it hade just before Facebook showed up, but it's certainly more vibrant today than it has been in quite a while. I'll take that as a win.

Does this mean you'll see updates from me 3X a week? Probably not. An actual personal blog post that isn't a travel update once per week is possible though. We will see how it goes. I published 60 blog posts last year, which I suspect makes me a one-percenter among still "active" blogs. I'll be quite happy if the term blogosphere stays dead and buried though.

It's a dreary Sunday morning in Richmond, overcast, chilly, with rain in the forecast. The bird feeder in the backyard is busy though, as the Dark-Eyed Juncos that are wintering in the trees behind the house are cleaning the yard of spilled seed while Bluebirds, Song Sparrows, American Goldfinches, and House Finches fight for space on the feeder. There is a Mourning Dove on the ground right now too. There were at least 12 birds at the feeder a few minutes ago.

Yesterday I went out birding for the first time this year, just down the road from the house at Echo Lake. I saw 17 species, including a stunning Belted Kingfisher, the Great Blue Heron that lives at the pond, and a male / female pair of Hooded Merganser. You can see my checklist from yesterday if you are interested.

I also completed my first book of the year this week, The Cartographers, which is a mystery thriller with some fantasy elements set in the world of the maps department at the NYPL, and involves a mystery involving a cheap fold out gas station map. It also digs into some meaty questions such as why do we make maps, and does a place exist if there is no map to get there? I stayed up late 3 nights in a row to finish the book, which you should take as a ringing endorsement.

I've been watching The Rockford Files again. I started it last year, unfortunately 2 or 3 weeks before it dropped off of Prime. It's available for free on Roku now, and the commercial breaks aren't overly annoying. We are also in season two of a Warehouse 13 re-watch (first time for Michelle), and we are in season 2 of The Americans.

January was scheduled to be a 3 concert month, but the flu forced us to skip The Kennedys at Jammin' Java last Friday. Drivin' N Cryin' is in town this coming weekend, and Abby Bryant will be in Charlottesville at the end of the month. Hopefully we'll make it to the upcoming shows.

2023 feels like the year where we settle into the new post-pandemic normal, whatever that may be. Personally, I'm over living in "interersting times." I could go for a couple of years of routine and boring.

And I'll wrap this up with a fun fact. January 2023 is the 40th anniversary of the Pyromania album from Def Leppard. Jan 1983 was closer to the end of WWII than it is to today.

What's up with you? Hit that reply link below and say hello.

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.

Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction is a book that anybody interested in birds, or conservation in general should read. It's the story of David Wingate and his single-minded, lifelong, quest to protect the Cahow, or Bermuda Petrel.

The Cahow was abundant and counted in the millions when Europeans first stumbled into Bermuda. They are truly amazing birds. Once they fledged from their Bermudian nesting burrows (of which over 80% are man made due to loss of habitat), they spend the next 3-4 years on wing over the ocean, not landing back on ground again until they return to Bermuda, usually within yards of their birthplace, to mate. As a bird that evolved on an island with no mammal predators, they were particularly ill suited for the the Spanish invasion of their breeding grounds. They were extinct within one human generation.

Or were they?

Despite no confirmed sightings for 300+ years, in 1951, 15 year old bird enthusiast David Wingate was accompanying a couple of researchers investigating the possibility that the bird was not quite extinct. They found 18 breeding pairs on small rocky islands around Bermuda. Wingate would spend the rest of his life working to protect the birds. The lengths he went to protecting and creating habitat for cahows is the story covered in the book. It's not hyperbole to suggest we'd be talking about cahows in past tense without Wingate. He literally saved the species.

Today, there are about 300 breeding pairs of cahow, making it the 2nd rarest seabird on the planet. That may not seem like much of an improvement from 1951, but they only lay one egg per season, and the success rate is not great. Unlike other birds that stick around to teach their young how to do important bird things like fly and hunt, cahow parents head back to sea when they chick is old enough to fend for itself, and the chick is on its own learning how to fly and survive.

The book is part biography of Wingate, part history of Bermuda, part history of wildlife conservation on Bermuda, part profile of these amzing birds, and part warning about the complexity of local ecosystems and how easy it is for humans to screw them up.

I read 47 books this year. There were a couple that I quit within 50 or so pages that never made the list. Below are my favorites from the year. Reviews are on my 2022 books page.

Fiction

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

90 Days in the 90s by Andy Frye

Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks

The Bookeaters by Sunyi Dean

Non-Fiction

A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder

Rethinking Fandom by Craig Calcaterra

Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals

Educated by Tara Westover

Acceptance: A Memoir by Emi Nietfeld

Short one kid this year, although if she had tried to fly home from Iowa on the 22nd she likely would have spent Christmas in O'Hare International. So maybe it was for the best.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, or have a pleasant Sunday if you aren't celebrating anything today.

Last year my wife got me a beer advent calendar. I finished them all on time, but it turns out drinking 24 days in a row, even if it is just one beer, is not something I really care to do anymore.

This year, I came downstairs the morning of December 1 to a tea advent calendar from Adiago Teas. I sound old just typing that, but then again, I am old.

So here are my tasting notes, updated periodically until we are done.

Cranberry tea - black tea with cranberries and raspberry leaves. Pleasant fruity tastes - pretty much delivers exactly what you would expect.

Candy apple tea - Much like cranberry tea above, delivers exactly what you would expect.

Citrus green - A green tea with lemon and lime flavor. A nice combination.

Chocolate truffle tea - A black tea with cocoa, chicory, dark chocolate and blue cornflowers. I really enjoyed this one.

Honeybush banana nut - The flavoring ingredients are apples, cinnamon, and cocoa. It wasn't a bad cuppa, but no hint of banana in it all to my palette.

Earl Grey- I've had Adiago Earl Grey before. It's obviously a classic flavor, and one they nailed.

Foxtrot - An herbal tea with chamomile and peppermint. It's not an unusual combination, and this is executed fine but it's not anything special.

Irish Breakfast - It's one of my go to teas from adiago.

Wuyi Oolong - This was a fabulous tea, maybe my favorite in the calendar. Top 2 or 3 for sure. It had an earthy aroma that reminded me of a long walk in a damp forest.

Jasmine Pearls - Another fabulous tea. A sweet, strongly floral flavor with a strong jasmine aroma.

Fruit Sangria- A really tasty and fun herbal tea that goes down nicely at night when you don't caffeine. Strongly fruity flavors, as you would assume by the name.

Chestnut tea - I wasn't super excited about this one, but it surprised me. The strong nutty flavor balances the dryness of the tea perfectly.

Peach oolong - Kind of hard to screw up a fruit oolong. This has long been a go-to nighttime tea for me.

Masala chai - Ginger and cloves - tastes like Christmas! Not something I would drink everyday, but tasty as a change of pace.

Green popcorn - A swing and a miss in my book. The popped rice nuttiness overwhelms the green tea base.

Pumpkin spice tea - Look, this pumpkin spice madness needs to end! I wanted to just skip this one but my wife insisted I need to be a completist about this. All I tasted was the ginger and cloves - not a hint of pumpkin flavor.

Gingerbread tea- So how many teas can we create by combining black tea, ginger, and cinnamon?

To be continued...