22 January 2025

 I'm not sure what to do with this site. Should I make it into a football-only site? Maybe record the daily weather? How about my own personal book club? A personal diary? All of the above? 

I don't know.

I suppose it doesn't really matter. I'm not marketing myself for an audience and if you don't promote a site, you don't get traffic. I'm good with that. This is for my own therapy. 

We all need a release valve. There can be no doubt today's world is far more toxic to one's mental health than it was 30 years ago. It is almost impossible to get away from the slings and arrows of social media (and yes, the irony that I am writing this on a website is not lost on me). I know for a fact my mind was much happier before Facebook, Instagram, etc. I find the less attention I pay to social media and news outlets, the better I am. 

Am I burying my head in the sand? To a degree, yes, I suppose I am. Does it really matter? No, it doesn't. The country will meander off the edge of the earth with or without me. This is not to imply I ignore current events and world news, but I try to tune the bullshit out. And most of it is bullshit.

Speaking of current events...

This year has been a theme of fire and ice so far. Fire on the West Coast: cataclysmic wild fires around Los Angeles earlier in January (they started on the 7th). Dry conditions with 100 mph winds make very favorable conditions for a catastrophe. Ice in the south: Lafayette, Louisiana, has more snow (10+ inches) than Baxter, Minnesota as of January 21. 

Are these cyclical patterns? Climate change? Even though the theory of climate change is based on the course and trends of 175 years worth of data, it doesn't exist if you say it doesn't exist. Draw a line in the sand and anything is political.

As John Lennon once wrote, "Living is easy with eyes closed."

Speaking of weather, we've had brutally cold temperatures here in central Minnesota earlier this week. Monday night was the coldest it has been in the last calendar year. It was -32° F on Monday night/Tuesday morning. It always amazes me that wildlife, like deer and birds, can exist in extreme cold like that, but they do. It is much more pleasant now -- something like 19° F right now. Above zero is always a nice thing. 

It is a little late for resolutions, but my son mentioned something yesterday that I have thought of before and I even made an abortive attempt at trying once: converting all my weather apps to Celsius/metric scale. In his words, "It's just so much easier to understand." (And so it is: 0 is when water freezes, 100 is when water boils. It is simply a paradigm shift to thinking anything from 17 to 29 Celsius is very pleasant. Anything below that is getting chilly and anything above that is getting hot.)

Liberia, Myanmar and the United States are the only three countries in the world that "officially" use the old imperial units. The U.S. isn't exactly a forward-moving, progressive nation, but obviously this is what the majority of Americans desire. Certainly, we are no longer leaders in education (far from it!). We've also fallen behind as the world leader in science and technology. That's not my opinion. That's a fact. Unless you choose to not believe it. Remember, it doesn't exist if you say it doesn't exist. Easy!

I finished a novella yesterday, The Pearl by John Steinbeck. I haven't read anything by Steinbeck that I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. The moral of this quick read was, essentially, "be careful what you wish for."

I think my next book is going to be Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. It is yet another classic I have not yet read.

Happy birthday to my dad, who was born on 21 Jan 1915.