34 weeks…

Well, it’s better than 39 like the last one huh?

Let’s start with that idea, why so long? Why can’t you just type up a post and hit Publish?

This just makes my mind go into bit of a spin. This information age we have now is crazy. The amount of information, the truth of the information, the ease to change information, the viewpoint of the information, and the intent difference between the one sharing the information and the one seeing the information is insanity.

So why do I post? It’s entertaining to me that people are interested enough in what I’m writing that we get comments about us not posting. It’s self satisfying that others want to read what I write. And last, it’s something I could and MIGHT look back on years from now, if WordPress doesn’t go under and erase all my data that is, cause I haven’t taken the time yet to do a backup locally.

So why do I NOT want to post? 1, It’s easy to see our travels and think that we aren’t helping with this COVID situation. 2, It’s difficult for me to get out of my head that I’m flaunting or showing off what I’m able to do. 3, It seems so easy these days for people to take things out of context, I do it myself. 4, Security and safety, it’s sad this is even a thing we have to worry about. And I’m sure there are others I’m not able to put into words right now.

Then why am I here posting now? Cause if I can get out of my head and just post and see what happens and continue if it makes others happy for a moment or gives ideas to others to check out and do or inspires anyone to create a journey in their own life in their own way, then I feel I should accept the negative and deal with it as it comes.

Let’s get to the lighter side of this and see what we’ve been up to:

August 2020 through mid September 2020

The “hunker down” option of Lake of the Ozarks: I had never been here before, see the signs all the time and totally got into the show! The show was nothing like our experience. We got setup in our daily routine of remote daily work, and then had our boat in a slip and the Lake right there, didn’t need to go really anywhere and being on a boat makes it easy to stay WAY more than 6 ft from others.

mid September 2020 to mid October 2020

A small town, country road to a road not even marked correctly on Google Maps, Centre, Alabama. The address might have been the town but it wasn’t really close, and even so that’s a small town! We did stop by a favorite for take away, Como Steakhouse! Highly recommended if you like a good steak. The house in Centre, was another nice place and stood alone, plenty of convenience, right next to a lake (albeit in a cove that had a shallow entrance) and a bit off-season for fishing. It worked out great to have space completely alone, and I was able to use the porch for storage and not be much worried about anyone getting close to the house to even notice things that could have walked off with. Besides a bit of fishing that resulted in pretty much NOTHING, I worked on the new truck. Removing the “blacked out” look was quite satisfying.

late October 2020

I’ve heard plenty of “reasons” why Taiwan was COVID free so quick and the only one that sticks the easiest is that it’s a relatively small island and fairly easy to cut off from outside travel. If you say it’s cause it’s Chinese ruled, let’s have a talk elsewhere, it might be under the “Global” label of China, but it’s clearly not when they work to defend themselves from the Chinese military. I’ve learned so much in just the past 2 years and for a country of 23 million people, you can’t just ignore it. So why do I mention this? Cause I traveled to Taiwan to help put on the 2020 Science Park Taichung 5G Pilot Regional (unfortunately there isn’t much other media out there). It was an interesting experience as I had to fly over 16 days prior to setup to quarantine in a hotel room, AFTER I got a test saying I didn’t have it, then flew over. So yes, there was a LOT of precautions taken by anyone coming into the country, but when I was ALMOST done with quarantine, they had gone 200 days without it locally. And even after I was out, I still wore a mask, as most did. Seems nearly logical these days as the bigger the population gets the quicker things manifest and although our bodies are wonders, we don’t adapt as quickly as things are getting spread these days. I wish Nicole could have been with me there, but their government only gave a few key volunteers permission to enter and all had to quarantine for 15 days.

November 2020 to mid December 2020

Nicole was at the next place without me for a bit. Her college town and where family are in Missouri. I’ll say it here, it’s much easier to not be close enough to anyone for anyone to show up then it is to be right around the corner and have to say no, or make extra precautions every time. So here’s to all of you that were diligent about helping reduce the spread. Even taking all the precautions wasn’t a 100% guarantee but I know it helped reduce the spread and the amount of damage it would do with the side effects becoming a lot less aggressive with less exposure. The stay here seemed pretty short to me, it was a lot more of doing our remote work thing and just hanging out at the house. We did a bit of walking outside at parks but for the most part, just stayed indoors.

Sorry no pictures to share here.

Christmas Week 2020 and the LONG stay till end of February 2021

COVID killed more plans. We were supposed to travel to Hawaii for my families Christmas. We haven’t been together for quite a long time, and not getting into it too much, I don’t work to keep in contact with my family. There is nothing that caused this, I had a great childhood and a great family, super lucky and no outstanding negative things that drove us apart, we just don’t communicate much. So due to the second/third/fourth ??? whatever wave you want to call it, where ICUs were yet again starting to get more patients and more huge public gatherings and mass amounts of people that just “didn’t see it” wanted to prove something, Hawaii closed it’s borders again, and we had to make new plans. Of course the last minute change means there aren’t many options and we ended up in Daytona Beach, FL for a week. With all the news stories going on around this time, it was SUPER easy to think that the entirety of Florida was crazy and it was a 100% sure thing that we’d get it going there. But as with everything you need to break down the details and not just assume, as it was mostly the Miami area with flooding crowds. Even so, we went in with caution. I’m very grateful that my family has always been about making sure people are comfortable in situations and accepting of others views even if they don’t agree, at least that’s the view I’ve always seen, so we got to visit from a bit of a distance, it was the first time we had eaten in a restaurant in about 9 months as we found a few “outdoor” or “open air” places with distanced setting or very few people. Could we have been in more crowded places and not gotten COVID, surely, but I’m glad we didn’t try.

After Christmas week, we hightailed it to a beach. Why a beach? Why not? More importantly, why not when Gulf Shores is super cheap this time of year as there isn’t much tourism happening. There is a lot of construction though! While here we went on some bike rides, plenty of walks, and of course walked over to the beach every so often. We did our remote thing and life went on.

March 2021

Seems things are getting a bit back to a new normal. At least for March, we traveled to Arizona to stay for the month. If you’re like me before this, you think Arizona and desert, dry, warm in the winter… Welp, I’ve never spent much time in Arizona. I mean I knew it was colder in the mountains, but the average high still showed 50-60 so I thought warmer. Depends on the time of day! The first picture below is the same day and only about 4-5 hours difference. With it being a much more outdoors options kinda place, easy to keep a distance, it’s been enjoyable. Plenty of hikes, places to checkout that are a drive away and there just aren’t that many people around. Here’s some pictures to enjoy.

What’s Next?

Soon we travel to checkout southern Colorado, so check back for details on how that is going, or went?

A GLIMPSE in the mind of Jerry

Curious on more of my thoughts on that “why I don’t want to post” well, here’s where you get more:

1. To this point, if you’ve read through most of this, you’ll see that part of our plans has revolved around places where we can “hide out”. And it’s not that we’re super afraid of getting COVID, we’d probably make it through with just the heavy flu symptoms that most others we know had. The big point was that us getting it, means we spread it. So much I want to point to about science here, and it diverges to so much chaos and crazy thoughts people seem to have, so the only thing I’m going to say, it’s been over a year, and it’s still an issue in the US. Leadership, education and compassion for others is obviously broken here, and it makes me sad to think of how much potential has been smashed and wasted.
2. Award shows have people stand on a podium and then say what makes NO sense to me (if someone can explain it, that would be great): “I’m humbled to receive this award”. WTF? to be humbled means you have been knocked down off your high horse, not honored with an award. Seems like this was the perfect spot for me to spit this out so I did! But to all this, I see we all have our own experiences and the commonality is that we all want that other experience “grass is always greener on the other side” right? Well, I’m very happy where I’m at, and SUPER lucky I’ve been able to go down this path and continue to do so. Here, I’d like to point out a book called “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell (this links to Wikipedia because it’s up to you on who to support on purchasing the book). This does a great job of pointing out that everyone gets help from other places. Something as simple as someone being given an opportunity somewhere along the line is still that helping hand. All I see when someone says they are a “self-made” person is that they think they are better than everyone else. Yes, you do need to have good skills but you have to know the right people and either put yourself in the right spots to get that help or be lucky enough to flow into those situations. NO ONE makes millions on their own.
3. To the third point, it seems the rat race and easy fixes and quick workaround and partial answers and just need the investors to see it’s making them money and going good has led to this crazy need for everything to be instantaneous reward. And this seems to have made learning about the whole picture/concept/reality of something a thing of the past to most. Some things can still be a quick reward, but everything, definitely not. But due to all this, its so easy to share something from someone else and not even realize what your sharing, as your intent is for a quick smile, is really revolving around an entire group of ideals. Showing a comic that hints at a racist thought for a “simple laugh” is what I see as this ignorance. Sure it’s funny when you see someone else get thrown into a dumpster or hair spray on the back then lit up as you walk down the hall (yes both personal experiences in HS), but it’s not to the one it happens to, and if you can’t step back and realize that, I feel sorrow, and I want to learn how to help others take this step back and think. AND this goes for me as well, I’m human, I’ve done it before I’ll probably be ignorant somewhere again, I wish that someone is there to point it out to me, NOT through violence.
4. Security and Safety – there’s lots of ways to look at this, and more then I’ll put here. The more of my information is out there, the easier it is for social engineering and computer algorithms to determine things like my passwords, access to my accounts, what gets me to want to buy something, what gets me fired up, what things could be slipped by my attention, even where valuables might be and when they are unprotected, etc etc. Take this world today, I’m sure you’ve seen advertisements on every webpage you go to after you bought something mundane online. Learning how this works has partly been my job, and I can tell you I don’t know it NEARLY as well as those who focus on this solely as their paid job, but they are data gathering at the same time as trying to get you to buy. Is it about YOU, no, it’s about numbers like sales always has been. How can I get the most amount of people to buy my product. Hair Tonic is needed by all, right? People STUDY what colors get the majority of people to do an action, so the more of my info that is out there, the more they know what category I fit into to sway me to buy something or to do something. Everyone only wishes they were as independently thinking as think they are. More of my info out there means guesses on pass phrases can be more accurate, I mean how many people use “petsnameyear” as their password, LOTS, how many use the company name they just made their account on as the password, probably even more… Also, keep in mind that statistically the chances are low here BUT as I was raised “a door lock only keeps the honest man honest” or in other words, if someone really wants to break into anything they will, but simple speed bumps or hurdles put in place means less will really want to. So, is it possible that any of this happens, YES, is it likely, probably not. At least it wasn’t until I put this into the world huh?…
5. It just takes quite a bit of time, I mean this has pretty much been my entire Sunday. I know, if I post more often, there’s less to write… Well, hopefully it’s been a good distraction for you, and wasn’t quite as long to read.

Maybe my next post will be less than 34 weeks!