Happy 15th Birthday to the Blog!

I've been blogging for 15 freaking years. Can you believe it? I certainly cannot.

While I can't say that I'm a good blogger, or even a regular blogger, I can say that I'm enthusiastic about the concept of blogging. I like the idea that a blog represents. A modern day public diary - what a concept! Anyone else, anyone?

While I'm enticed by the idea that my thoughts and writings could live on well beyond me, I'm also loath to put my opinions on the internet for anyone to read. Especially since the opinions I've posted to this very blog in the past have proven - with the benefit of time and self-maturity - to be very very bad opinions. For example, just 2 years ago in January of 2020, I wrote that the Australian Wildfires would be a bigger story in 10 years than Coronavirus would. What a terrible projection!

In truth, my blog is more for me as a way to remember my own life, but I don't do a great job of posting things about my own life. In some ways the never ending coronavirus series is as close to a diary as I've done on the blog, and that was specifically the point as I immediately realized COVID would be a period of my life worth remembering in detail. So I wrote it down.

There are other things that are worthy of writing down and documenting for my future self to enjoy and reflect upon (and opinions to be disgusted by). I do think I should do a better job at putting those things on the blog.

15 years seems like the right time to also change the title of the Blog again. Against The Wind served me well in my younger bad boy days. But now I'm settled and I've come to the conclusion that my previous anti-wind opinion was wrong. I'm now pro-wind! So a new name it is.

Coronavirus Part 8

Welp, it's been 6 months since my last Coronavirus post. In that post I wrote about how a hot new variant dropped (Delta) and that I thought COVID would be a thing at least through the holidays. That has proved true. But we recently got another new variant (Omicron) which has quickly spread throughout the world. This variant seems to be the most contagious yet, and even people who are vaccinated are getting it at a seemingly high rate. The only good news is that it seems that this variant is somewhat less severe. It looks like we're on the uptick for another surge. The other news is that they started rolling out booster shots for adults and vaccines for children 5 and up. So now only our youngest is unvaccinated, so we're feeling pretty good about not dying from COVID, but we still aren't enthused about the idea of getting very sick for a week or two, so we're doing our best to avoid it. 

But life continues to be mostly back to normal except with more masks and not as much in-person interactions. We hosted my sister and my folks for Christmas, and luckily Omicron didn't impact us like it did for many others with flights and trips cancelled due to the virus. 

Going on two years of the virus, I'm starting to wonder if the people saying "COVID is just something we have to learn to live with" might actually be right. It seems like if we haven't gotten the vaccination levels needed to kill it off, we're just going to be in a never ending battle to respond to variants that evolve to defeat our vaccines. But even so, I think we'll get to the point where it's better contained and we can go back to life as normal. The question now is how many variants and how many surges will it take to get there. I'm not even going to venture a guess about when that might be. But I hope my next post in this series will be a victory message.