Getting Back into Training
Jul. 3rd, 2023 02:09 pmI'm going on a trip. The primary destination will be Olympia, Washington. I expect to be there a little over a week.
And yet, I will be away from home for most of August: not quite three weeks. I expect to leave Marshall on Monday, 08-07, and get back on Sunday, 08-27.
Why Olympia? The Pacific Northwest is usually a little bit cooler than where I live. And I hope to visit Olympic National Park, and perhaps also make it to Victoria, British Columbia.
And why will it take so long to get from home to Olympia and back? To me, that's not a bug, it's a feature. You see, I'm a rail fan, and most of the miles will be covered by train.
More specifically, most of them will be on the Empire Builder. That one train will take me from Chicago to Seattle. And on return, it will take me from Portland (Oregon, of course) back to Chicago.
And the Empire Builder is the longest Amtrak route that I haven't traveled before. So you could call it a bucket list thing. Probably most people would think it eccentric to decide on that basis, but hey, it's a free country. So far.
Summer. Yuck.
Jun. 26th, 2023 03:45 pmI really, really don't like summer. Not in any of the places that I've lived since I left graduate school in 1972, at any rate. All of those places have been in the Eastern time zone of the USA, and you will note that I now have completed fifty-one years of not liking summer.
What don't I like about it? The weather, obviously. The heat, and the humidity. That's what you get in the eastern US. Okay, bits of New England are partial exceptions, but still.
Would I be happier in a place like New Mexico, where it gets pretty hot but is always much less humid? A few years back, I thought so. I spent a non-trivial amount of time there, most recently in August of 2019, for the purpose of testing that hypothesis. And what was my conclusion?
Strictly speaking, I suppose I would be happier there, weather-wise. But not enough so. I could conceivably still decide to move there, but, since that last trip, any real enthusiasm for the idea has pretty much evaporated. Like summertime rain there: at times, you can see rain in the sky above you, but it doesn't reach the ground.
For that matter, my history of trying to escape from typical Eastern summers goes further back than that. It was a big part of the motivation for the last move I actually did make: from the Raleigh area (in the region of North Carolina known as the Piedmont) to the Ashville area (in the western mountains of the same state). It's the same story: I do like the summer weather here better than I did there, but not nearly enough so to make me glad when the summer begins.
In short, I really don't like summer.
It has come to my attention, however, that not everyone feels the same way. There are even some, bless their strange little hearts, who enjoy what it's like in summer even in a place like Raleigh.
I invite you to tell us how you feel about summer weather. About summers where you live, or if so moved about those in some other place you've been.