Scribbles from R Scott Jones
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The bowling trophy

A number of years ago, I met a new friend via instagram. She was trying to visit all 400+ National Park units, a goal I was nearing completion of*. So I offered to get together for happy hour so I could impart some of the hard-earned lessons I had learned while pursuing the same quest. We did, seemingly leaving as good friends after 4-5 hours of great conversation. A couple weeks later, she asked me if I could fill in for her boyfriend on their bowling team for a few weeks. He's a tax accountant and was in "busy season."...
June 3rd, 2024 #100DaystoOffload

Two Men in a McDonald's in Small Town America

My long road trips usually involve passing through countless rural outposts of what is known as small town America. Often, the easiest place to grab a bite is at some fast food chain; many times, it's the only option available. If I can eat inside, I usually do. And inside many of them, there are two older men sitting together. Sometimes they're actively conversing. Sometimes, they're just sitting there. Together. Not reading the daily newspaper (do those even exist anymore?), or looking at a phone, or otherwise engaged in much of anything besides sitting and occasionally poking at their order....
June 2nd, 2024

A month of #WeblogPoMo2024

A quick roundup of my month of concerted blogging for #WeblogPoMo2024. My goal for #WeblogPoMo2024 was 31 posts. I knew I wouldn't stick to a rigid one-per-day cadence, as we originally had three trips totaling 15 days away planned for the month (in fact, we were supposed to be en route to a campsite this morning). But of course, our plans changed considerably when my dad was rushed to the hospital on May 8, and we then spent 5 torturous days in the ICU as he succumbed, finally passing away on the 13th. This is my first major death, and...
May 31st, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

Attempting a mini retirement

The first time I heard the term "mini retirement" was in Tim Ferrissā€™s (unfortunately named book) The Four Hour Workweek. The underlying idea is to not wait to do stuff that's important to you until a future that may not arrive; that with a bit of planning and (ahem) "lifestyle design," you might be able to prioritize something a lot earlier than you had expected. Several years ago, my wife and I started exploring the concept for our own lives. We were already making some big decisions about designing the life we wanted, which (if you know us) naturally focused...
May 31st, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

Why I'm sticking with Wordpress, at least for now

I love many of the new, simple blogging platformsā€”Scribbles, Pika, Micro.blog, Bear Blog, omg.lol, and so forth. They're useful for helping you get words on page without much fuss. You don't worry about endlessly tweaking your design, because there really isn't much of one. Like social media, it's more standard interface than personal website. This can be refreshing for those of us who don't enjoy tinkering with code; it lets you focus on what you write, not how everything looks. But in that simplicity, I'm finding it more difficult to abandon Wordpress for my primary site than I'd like it...
May 31st, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

My blogging process

...is a fucking mess. Just a total shitshow. Somebody help me!! Hereā€™s what Iā€™ve got. My main site is rscottjones.com, and thatā€™s where Iā€™ve tried to keep all the action. Thatā€™s my permadomain. Itā€™s an old Wordpress install thatā€™s undergone numerous...weā€™ll call them ā€œeras.ā€ A personal blog for the longest time, then focused on travel, then posts merged in from a separate travel blog I wrote for awhile, now moving back towards a more personal feel. But, of course, the design sucks and the plugins I used to build it have expired. Iā€™m due for a total overhaul, but Iā€™m...
May 30th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

Pre-mourning

My dad passed away recently after spending the last four years in an assisted living facility after a sudden health crisis in 2020. But for 20 years before that, he was a near-daily regular at his local pub, The Dubliner. Yesterday, I returned to the Dub for the first time since his death to see his old bar friends and answer any questions they had about what life had been like for him these last several years. After all, I'm pretty sure that only a few had been able to talk directly with him since then, and the life change...
May 29th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

A glimpse into kayaking the Salt River

I couldn't sleep last night, and ended up reviewing a bunch of instagram stories from 2020, starting with the hospital visit that began my dad's health crisis. Man, that was a rough year. ROUGH. Dealing with my dad's sudden decline and transition to an assisted living facility was hard enough, but having to do it all during covid was just plain crazy. It's no wonder that I spent so much time paddling on the Salt River, a calm refuge from the chaos and stress of my suddenly-hijacked life. Hell, I even wrote the only guidebook to kayaking the river that...
May 26th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

Some unexpected ways I rely on my Apple Watch

It took me awhile to warm to the idea of buying an Apple Watch. I'm not sure what generation I finally jumped in (must have been 3 or 4?), but it's become something I find quite useful and feel weird going without. There were a number of reasons I finally took the plunge, pushed in large part when the step-counter alternatives I had been using became feature-rich but generally underwhelming. It was only the Apple Watch's dismal battery life that had initially held me back, and once that seemed good enough, I finally took out my wallet. I have not...
May 25th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

Reclaiming space on my Home Screen

One of the weird things about my dad passing away last week is that I suddenly have "new" available space on my phone's Home Screen. Five new icons or folders can replace the previous ones I devoted to his care. This is oddly exciting. A big part of that is because I get to change some default behaviors I've had the last few years. Behaviors like reflexively tapping the Waze camera app to see if he was awake or sleeping, trying to assess from afar how he was doing today. Could I parse if it was a good day or...
May 20th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024

My dad died this week

My dad Norman passed away this week at age 89. I've started putting together a remembrance site for him, and it's hard not to consider how crazy of a life he lived. I'll write more about this in the coming weeks. Some of the highlights: Norman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1935, just in time for WWII. Their house was firebombed by the Germans during the Belfast Blitz, though they had already retreated to the country when it happened. Norman rebelled against the fundamentalist religious upbringing he had, and was eventually shipped out of the country to America...
May 17th, 2024 #WeblogPoMo2024
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