from rscottjones

I only occasionally participate in these topical indieweb blogging..uhh…things (challenges? trends? prompts? wtf are these called?), but this is one of those occasions. So after seeing posts from Leon, Kev, and Alex recently, here are my answers to this random set of ten questions that David had originally posed back in April (he’s collecting responses there, in case you’re interested in joining in).

Do you floss your teeth?

I do, probably twice a day, sometimes more often. I have shitty teeth, and in spite of my various efforts, I’ve self-funded fancy cars for multiple dentists and dental specialists. So flossing is a must for me, and I’m also easily frustrated by shit stuck in my teeth. It’s the worst. So I have those little flossers with me often; I keep them in each bathroom at home, our cars, laptop bags, toiletry bags, even an emergency one in my wallet. If you need a flosser, I got you covered. Just say “flosser, stat!” and I’ll have one your hand asap.

I know my dentist doesn’t fully approve of this style of flossing, but look, it’s the only way it’s going to get done. “I can see that you’ve been flossing,” he’ll say, and I’ll poke him by replying, “yeah, only because of those flossers you hate.” And then he’ll get to work replacing, somewhat roughly, a crown that was poorly done by a previous dentist who also hated flossers. It’s the circle of life, or some shit like that. And no, I don’t do the waterpik thing, that’s essentially self-waterboarding and I cannot be a party to such an immoral endeavor. Society has rules.

Tea, coffee, or water?

I’m not a big fan of any of them, to be honest. I now drink 2ish cups of coffee in the morning—avert your eyes now, coffee-lovers—usually covering up the flavor with sugar and an unseemingly amount of flavored creamer. You may not, but my aforementioned dentist approves. I do enjoy the smell though, and the caffeine helps, as does the morning ritual; I can see why it’s popular. I tried fancy tea for a bit, but couldn’t get into it; it doesn’t help that Jen is a staunch tea-hater, still proud of the colonists for dumping that shit into the bay.

Water is water; I primarily drink it when I’m specifically trying to hydrate, usually during exercise, or after an evening of drinks out with friends, or during outdoor pursuits. Unlike nearly any other beverage, drinking water gives me heartburn, which I don’t understand but find exceedingly frustrating. But in spite of that, I always have an insulated tumbler of water at my bedside, refilling it every night right before bed. I routinely want a sip in the middle of the night, often a dry mouth from an evening of serenading the ceiling paint. Last year I added a silicone footer to the metal tumbler, so it doesn’t bang the nightstand and wake up my wife when I awkwardly set it back down after a sleepy sip, and that’s inspired me to take a sip far more often.

On the other beverage front, I probably drink more Dr Pepper—my lifelong soda preference—than I should during the day, or Arizona Iced Tea’s (non-tea, and obviously non-juice too) Mucho Mango during road trips. And I chose craft beer as my selection for my personal “One Vice Rule,” having completely avoided alcohol until my early 30s. If you follow me, you probably already know plenty about that, so I won’t mention that I hit my goal of 500 local breweries visited and 5000 unique craft beers consumed last year (cumulative, my friend, since I started keeping track a decade ago, not during 2024 alone).

Footwear preference?

I wear chaco sandals for as many days of the year as I can. I consider most footwear—the closed toe type, at least—to be tiny prisons for my feet (and yes, this includes socks, too). So chacos it is—specifically the Z/1 classic variety, in black. Nothing fancy, just a solid sandal that I can wear anywhere. Hell, I’ve backpacked a chunk of the Grand Canyon in them. Whenever I buy a new pair, the old pair immediately becomes my “river shoes,” the ones I wear kayaking (that end up with a funky river smell and therefore live in the garage with my boat and kayaking gear).

But if I do need to wear non-sandals, my go-to right now are Merrell Men’s Nova 3 (the waterproof variety). I have wide feet and absolutely despise shoe shopping, so after having a good experience with the Merrell Moab Ventilator more than two decades ago, I’ve just continued to buy the same damn shoe ever since. At least until 3-4 years ago, when I switched to the Nova, which look a bit nicer for travel but still handle the trail just fine. The only problem is that when they get wet, they squeak. It’s annoying af, but again, I hate shoe shopping, which is more excruciating than hearing a squeak every step. On the Idiocracy side, I also own two pairs of crocs, which serve as home “slippers” and camp shoes (and campsite shower shoes too).

Favorite dessert?

Hmm, I suppose mine would be ice cream, which we only sometimes keep at home. My favorite “healthier alternative” dessert is frozen fruit, especially pitted sweet cherries, blueberries, or mango chunks. An occasional special treat is a Dairy Queen Blizzard, a longtime favorite, or one those ice cream snickers bars. It’s extremely rare that I order dessert after dinner at a restaurant (seriously rare, maybe once in the last decade? I couldn’t even tell you), so it’s usually just simple things at home. That said, we’ll occasionally grab a slice of pie or an ice cream cone or a gelato while traveling, perhaps not for post-dinner dessert per se, but just as an afternoon treat.

The first thing you do when you wake up?

First thing I do is look at the time, and wonder if I should sleep more. Generally speaking, I’m not good at the whole sleeping thing, so it’s often a question of whether I should keep trying or not—not having a required work start time helps me be flexible most mornings. After that, if I’m waking up in my bed at home (as opposed to a tent or hotel room or the back of my Subaru), I’m starting a cup of coffee and heading to the bathroom to make some space for said coffee. If I’ve noticed the medications reminder on my watch, it’s then pouring out the morning’s pills from the pill container and downing them in small batches with that bedside glass of water. These days I have waaay too many pills—half of which are for my allergies, the other half for heart stuff. After that, I usually head to my home office and check the news, my rss reader, micro.blog and mastodon, perhaps even email, while I sip the coffee and plot the day.

Age you’d like to stick at?

Hmm, probably early to mid 30s. Old enough to have gained some hard-won wisdom, but still free of any health concerns, including those stupid minor aches and ailments that randomly appear in your 40s. Still more of your expected health span remaining than not, but enough years of earning behind you to skip the dollar Kraft dinner if you want.

How many hats do you own?

No clue, but it’s probably a lot. I have 4-5 dedicated ASU football hats, each geared for a different fan color (we have “blackout” and “maroon monsoon” homes games each season, plus the standard gold home color). And I have a bunch of hats for kayaking, several of which were free giveaways (perfect for river trips). And then a number of wide-brimmed hats for hiking, travel, and other outdoor pursuits. And then a number of other baseball-style travel and hiking hats. And I suppose also a whole bunch of different warm/knit hats, for camping and cold weather destinations, that I’ve collected over the years.

So I guess that’s a lot (?), even for living in a very sunny place, but it’s rather unintentional. I’m not at all a big hat guy, most of these are a decade or two old but lack any good reason to discard them. I could get along with just one gold ASU hat, one wide brimmed hat for the outdoors, and one folding baseball-style hat for travel and the outdoors without missing much.

Describe the last photo you took?

I happened to buy a couple folding e-bikes yesterday, so these are the last two photos I took (yes, I’m stoked about having folding ebikes we can bring on trips). We bought an ebike two years ago as a hedge against fixing my Subaru Outback, which seemed to have a major transmission issue that would cost more than 3x the vehicle’s value to get fixed. The ebike would allow me to run local errands and visit my dad in his assisted living facility and even make it to happy hour, and bowling, and small grocery runs. While we had already saved most of the cash for a vehicle purchase, we weren’t ready to buy just yet, still deciding between an SUV, an adventure van we could build out, or maybe a hybrid minivan that could be a microcamper, or…well, shit, we really weren’t sure what was best. So an ebike was a stopgap while we figured it out (Announcer: “And they still haven’t figured it out.”). As it happened, a Subaru specialty mechanic got the vehicle working for only $800, and we didn’t need the ebike for transportation. But damn, riding it was fun as hell, and biking was suddenly a regular activity again.

So we got a second one for Jen and started biking for most local trips, especially when we headed out for happy hour or to see my dad. It’s essentially replaced most short vehicle trips, at an operating cost of only 1 cent per mile and the added benefit of some quick exercise (our ebikes are only class I pedal assist, so the motor only functions while you’re actively pedaling). We started coffeeneuring, Jen started a quest to ride every public road in our neighborhood village in Phoenix, and we started thinking about how much fun having an ebike would be while we traveled—exploring other cities, riding rail-to-trails, poking around forest roads from our campsite…lots of possibilities.

The ebikes we bought have been great, but we can’t easily transport them—not even across town to ride. But, with yesterday’s purchase of folding ebikes, we will finally be able to do that. And, even better, we can bring them on road trips, something we’re quite excited about.

Worst TV show?

Local morning shows and local TV news, those are the utter worse imo. When I was seemingly the first person to complete the Treasured Places quest (aka, visiting every national park unit, national monument, and national conservation area in the US), I got a bunch of calls from the network morning shows wanting to feature “my story.” Hard fucking pass!! I stopped watching local TV news back in college when it became too obviously, well, uninformative and useless. A close third here would be just about any reality show, whose contrived drama offers no apparent redeeming qualities. A cheap response to a writers strike that somehow gained traction amongst Americans, like those gossip rags at the grocery store checkout. Gross!

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

I didn’t have a strong long-term career desire growing up. I had several interests based on various school studies between late elementary school and early high school (marine biology, park ranger, scientist, etc). The only one I took any serious steps towards was law enforcement. I joined the Mesa Police Explorer program, which was a cadet program for high school and college kids. I quickly rose the ranks, learned a lot, and even though I went to college on ATF’s dime, decided that it wasn’t for me…just as I was being promoted to Captain, the top position. My plan had been federal law enforcement, not local police, and by that time I had decided that while public service was something I enjoyed, I didn’t respect the culture and daily realities of law enforcement.

I looked a bit at public administration, and law, and one of those probably would have worked for me fine. I’m well suited for both, and either could do good for society, which was my primary motivating driver. As it turned out, I accidentally registered for an internship in my second semester of college, an endeavor which ended up changing the Arizona Constitution (a change twice upheld by the US Supreme Court). Anyway, that experience—along with learning HTML and helping a friend win elective office—led me to get involved in public lands conservation and other public policy efforts, and well, that was that.

I’ve always been a bit counter-cultural, especially in terms of money and consumerism and career, and have since found myself semi-retired at a relatively young age—a product of being willing to think outside the box and chase time freedom and travel opportunities over income, ego, and status purchases. So now I’m fortunate to focus on other efforts, rather than directly trading time for dollars. Navigating an anti-career is a bit trickier than you’d expect, but I wouldn’t trade it either.