Saturday afternoon at the office.
My local public library branch now offers their own version of Amazon Lockers for hold items, which means you can show up any time of day and pick up the book or media item you reserved online without ever going inside.
I forgot to post this last week, but I also finally updated my progress on a few other relatively new quests (aka, Jen helped research a bunch of shit for me).
→ A National Park in 50 Different Countries: rscottjones.com/quests/na…
→ 100 UNESCO World Heritage Sites: rscottjones.com/quests/un…
→ Seven Natural Wonders of the World: rscottjones.com/quests/se…
→ Countries & Territories of the Caribbean: rscottjones.com/quests/co…
9 years ago today, I visited—nay, SUMMITED—the very very very tippy top high point of…Delaware. No safety ropes, sans supplemental oxygen, avoiding certain danger. Badass style.
IT MADE ME FEEL SO ALIVE
(and marked off another item on my High Points of Otherwise Flat States quest)
😆🤣🤣
This 22-min video on the secret economics of Google Street View, especially the “unofficial” street view additions, was more interesting than I expected.
A rabbit hole to determine if human blood accounts for 2% of all US exports.
Whoops, I accidentally adopted a new quest today:
☑️ Visiting a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 50 Countries. 😆🤣🤷♂️
(I’m at 27/50)
More time zone craziness:
If you celebrated New Year’s Eve on Kiritimati, went to bed, woke up, enjoyed your New Year’s Day, went to bed again, woke up a few minutes after midnight on the 2nd of January, and took a plane to Jarvis Island, you could arrive just in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
Fell down the rabbit hole on this stuff a few years ago when I was considering adopting an “All the Time Zones” quest:
📺 I Found the Dumbest Time Zone
In the end, I made a simple goal of visiting at least 24 Time Zones. With offsets, there are 38 total time zones, and I’m currently at 23 of 24.
The view from home - #the100pics
Made it to the new Arizona Wilderness Brewing “Miracle Mile” location today, an early happy hour with a buddy and Jen. Always good beer at Wilderness, and I like this “embossed” mural on the wall.
Chris La Tray is feeling like a poet again (and also shares some poems from 2025’s Voices for the West compilation).
What I mean by “feeling like a poet” is the sense of awareness to the world beyond the task list. It means looking for and acknowledging the return of all my bird friends and relatives, more who arrive at the end of their migration here every day. When we cloister indoors all the time it is easy to overlook, or even forget, all the lives that are being boisterously lived all around us, all the time. Recognizing this and reveling in it is what makes me feel like a poet again.
I updated my /now page.
Hank Green on How We Form Opinions, and why it matters right now.
My dad would have turned 90 today.
I’ve really struggled this week, but we did our best to celebrate his birthday by raising a glass in his honor at The Dubliner, his fav bar (where we ran into a few of his old friends, incl Walt, a close friend), and at Cold Beers, our local bar during his last years..
Was great to see Lauren, who was the bartender at Cold Beers that was so gracious to us while he was on hospice. She keeps a thank you note in her wallet I wrote her back then.
I have no idea who Srnka was, or how I acquired this, but I’ve been using this tape measure my entire adult life and it’s apparently older than I am.
Had a fun evening at the ASU fan fest. Always great to catch a spring practice at the stadium, especially when it involves photos with the conference trophy and the Territorial Cup!
I think this 2008 post by Zeldman speaks to what became the fatal flaw of twitter: a shift from a new way to connect with other people—the “social” in what was then called social networking—to publishing & distribution (renamed social media), which had an entirely different set of incentives.
There were seven new National Heritage Areas designated in 2023, but I never got around to updating my list. But as I plot out an upcoming road trip, I figured it was time to update the list and see how many of these new ones I still need to mark off for my NHAs quest. The answer: none—whew!! 😆