I have been behind in awarding the Stay-At-Home Bowl trophy, which is given to a team who defeats both Super Bowl participants.
2020: No winner.
2021: 49ers and Packers
2022: No winner.
The 2021 season was the first one since 2008 to feature two winners.
Last month, I visited my 55th World Heritage Site, Belem Tower in Lisbon, Portugal.
The other part of the World Heritage Site is a monastery. I did not visit it, but here I am holding some pastries in front of it.
Since I'm re-invigorating the blog, I thought I would update some of my more interesting fixations. One of those is seeing how many World Heritage Sites I can visit.
Since my last update, more sites have been inscribed (though none I've visited), bringing the total to 1154.
I've been away from blogging for a while (yikes, only 5 posts last year...and pretty boring ones, frankly). I started this blog during a difficult time in my life. Twenty-two years later, I find myself in a surprisingly similar one, so it seemed appropriate to return to the blog to express myself.
At least for now, I'm going to talk about more cheerful things.
In 2004, I declared a goal of reading all the books to win the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
My most recent update was in 2019. I only had 5 books left. Well, three more years have added three more novels to read. I have, however, read all three.
The 2019 winner was Song for a New Day. I mostly listened to it on my drive cross-country last year to visit my mother in Arizona. It largely concerns people not wanting to live their houses because of a pandemic. Eerie. I gave it 4 stars.
The 2020 winner was Network Effect, book 5 in the Murderbot series. I gave it five stars; I have really enjoyed the whole series.
The 2021 winner was A Master of Djinn, another 5-star book. It is a mystery set in an alternate-history, steampunk 1910 Cairo. With lots of magic. It's great, and I hope to see more books in the series.
So it's back to 5 left. The good news is that I am back to flying again, and I do some of my best reading in the skies.
After not geocaching in August and September, I found 12 caches in October and 24 in November, for a pretty busy fall.
On October 3, I found a single challenge cache. On the 8th, I found my first Adventure Lab (and a bonus cache) along with 6 challenge caches. I had avoided adventure labs for a while because they count as a "find" but not a "cache," which is confusing. But I might want to do one with the boys at some point, so I thought I'd see what was going on. Two of the challenge caches were new difficulty terrain combos (D/T #47 and #48). Another challenge cache was the first cache I found placed in October 2018 (Month 224).
On the 11th, I decided to push towards my long-standing goal of finding caches in all 24 Maryland counties. I headed for the lower Eastern Shore and found one cache in each of the counties there (Counties 159-162). Two of them were from new months, May 2005 and July 2009 (Months 225 and 226). That left three Maryland counties.
On the 7th, I headed out in Northern Virginia specifically looking for unfound months. I found six of them (Months 227-232) and a challenge cache.
I found one more cache on the 12th, and then on the 13th, I headed for West Virginia, mostly with the aim of finishing the 77 Degrees West challenge (I have now found one starting W77 00, one starting W77 01, etc.). That day, I also found my first cache in Berkeley County (County 165).
On the 20th and 21st, I went caching in Pennsylvania. Somehow, I was right near an unfound cache, so I grabbed FTF #25, and my first in Pennsylvania. All in all, I found caches in five new counties (Counties 166-170). The FTF was actually placed on October 31, so I got October 2021 as Month 233.
Finally, I found four caches on Thanksgiving, including one placed in September 2021 (Month 234).
