And so, here we arrive at the eleventh straight month of weekly photo challenges. I’m fast approaching 52 straight weeks of photo challenges…

So, now it’s time to see if my November efforts were profound, perfunctory, or both.

45. Face a Fear

This is a shot from my hike of the Dirty Harry Peak Trail. The fears were ostensibly the cliff I was walking out on, and the wet low visibility drive out there.

I like this shot.

On the one hand, I’m leaning hard on using roadways as a leading line, which is a bit of a thoughtless, easy composition by this point. But, because the road is so windy and reflective, and only really in the bottom 2/3 of a photo dominated by mountains, this adds some complexity to the cliche.

Last weekend I decided to go on a stroll and check out some of the “beaches” along the shores of Lake Washington in Eastern Seattle.

We’ll get there in a bit, but first, excuse me whilst I soapbox. (After all, I’m posting this on Black Friday, and I can’t think of a better day to complain about politics…)

Ohio was dubbed “the hypnotic state” by my friend Jim. As I drove down miles and miles and miles of Ohio interstate, wondering when I’d get to Indiana, I couldn’t help but feel hypnotized by this Buckeye-shaped state’s corn laden US highways…

Backing up for a minute – I do have to say that I found my time in Ohio rewarding. I think I would probably enjoy spending some more time exploring the state.

On a quick passer-through I had to pick and choose my stops, and I daresay I chose wisely… This post covers the first four out of five stops, the last being reserved for its own post.

Before I departed westward, I had spent a long time thinking about different places I could visit on my way. I messaged friends. I got free travel brochures from nearly every state that I could cross through, and soon delighted friends and family with fun facts about Wisconsin’s Rustic Roads, or, say, Ohio’s state fruit. (The tomato!)

When push came to shove, well, I had a fairly detailed plan up until Minnesota. But, it was tricky to balance work, packing, and planning, especially when I wasn’t sure when my car would be ready

My first stop would of course be Pittsburgh, where it soon turned out that the first person I was planning to visit and possibly stay with was in self-quarantine after a potential COVID exposure at a wedding.

With notions of alternate plans and fabulous hipster pizza in mind, I hit the pike – the Pennsylvania Turnpike, to be more precise, and soon rolled into town.

In this post, I’m kicking off a series describing various stops on my way west to Seattle, a journey that took three weeks, spanned 4,400 miles, and crossed 14 U.S. states.

Except, of course, before I could leave, I had to hang out at my parents’ house and pack. Lord knows, we need a blog post specifically devoted to that, right?

It’s been a wee little while since I last posted about my current status, dreams, whereabouts, etc. Let’s rectify that!

I spent a lot of my first week, and then my first month rushing around trying to get my proverbial _____ together. I’m almost settled, except for the fact that I occasionally remember that I’m lacking something basic like a clothes hamper, or that I still haven’t hung my giant teardrop-shaped nazar on the wall.

So, how is Seattle so far?

Hello, readers!

This is a brief announcement that my hiatus from posting anything but the bare minimum has now ended. I am returning to my wiley ways of sporadically updating the website when I see fit, ideally about things that happened two months ago.

I’d like to forewarn that upcoming content will be temporally muddled, as I plan to simultaneously cover my present and recent past(s), while doubling back to post content that has sat in my drafts folder forever.

Pay attention to the “SERIES: “ information at the top or bottom of the post if you get lost.

Meanwhile are a few technical improvements that I’ve implemented on the backend of the site. Some of them should be readily apparent.

The main one is that there is now a “map” page, which contains a map populated with points which link back to my posts. It was a fun challenge to figure out how to embed geographical coordinates in headers to my markdown files, and automatically aggregate them into an interactive map (using the OpenLayers javascript library.)

I might write a post some day on how it’s implemented, but since I decided to go ahead and ship my minimally viable product without a fair deal of refactoring and improvements, well.. I’mma hold off for now.

A less noticeable improvement is that when you click “continue reading” on a post, it will now send you to the point where the introductory text stopped. I don’t know why it took me two years to fix that. But it did.

As for other changes, hopefully you won’t notice them.

Steve out!