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.

UC Davis College Rating

I love college towns. I think they are the best type of towns. I think it's the combination of the energy that students bring to a place along with anchor of a campus and the the types of businesses that typically surround colleges. As a deli and pizza guy, college towns suit my palate.

In San Diego we lived about 2 miles from San Diego State. While I don't consider big cities like San Diego to be college towns, we did live near enough to the campus where it did feel a bit like a college town. I loved driving through campus, seeing the kids on their skateboards, and telling Carly that Sig Ep was throwing down that night with a double kegger (which was probably true). SDSU has a reputation as a bit of a party school and in all the years we lived nearby it seemed to make sense. There were times that I found myself jealous of the young and beautiful college kids having the time of their lives.

Now we live in Davis, which is also a college town. Technically we live adjacent to campus, but it's about a mile to where the academic and residential buildings are. It's more of a college town that reminds me of Ann Arbor with the big tree lined streets and the campus integrated into the city. But the students here couldn't be any more different than those of Michigan or San Diego State. 

During what would be considered welcome week Carly and I were out in downtown Davis just blocks from campus and their was nary a stumbling student anywhere. We were on the South U equivalent of Davis and it was kind of dead. I couldn't believe it. Then a few weeks ago my buddy Dave came to visit and we went to a Aggie Football game. We were tailgating a bit in front of the stadium and watching the students arrive. It was a night game, and having been to a few college football night games I was expecting a shitshow. On the contrary. We didn't see a single student that looked even a little inebriated. I've yet to see a yard littered with solo cups. For shame.

The students here also dress very differently than those of SDSU. On the SDSU campus the kids looked so fucking cool, and the all had the bodies to back it up. Here in Davis it's a lot of unwarranted midriff that no one wants to see and guys with t-shirts tucked into cuffed jeans. I don't get it at all. Sober and poorly dressed is no way to go through college.

Now this blog at one time had a feature where I rated colleges on 4 key areas. It's been awhile since I've done one, but I think I'm ready to rank UC Davis.

Campus layout:
The UC Davis Campus is actually pretty good. It flows nicely into the the downtown and the students all ride bikes. The buildings are mostly postwar architecture and not very classically collegiate. Rating: B+

Student Population:
Total nerds. Rating: D

Night Life: 
I've seen zero evidence of any house parties. Frats seem small and not very wild. Off campus bars mostly cater to townies. Rating: D

Food, Stadium, Bus System, Other:
Food is fine. Big international student population means a good variety of restaurants, mostly cheap, nothing that I'd consider a "must try". Great bus system with the old London double-deckers. Stadium is decent for a FCS team. Tailgate scene was marginal, but again... FCS. Rating B-

OVERALL RATING: C+

Coronavirus Part 7

5 months ago I checked-in on COVID-19 and it's impact on my life. Since that time, things went totally back to normal... briefly. By June the county I live in was down to an average daily new cases in the high-teens. Not bad for a county with nearly 500,000 people in it. However we've become plagued by the new, and more contagious, Delta Variant. As a result we're now seeing around 150 daily cases.

This is a major setback in the end-game of the pandemic, and one that could have possibly been avoided if more of my countrymen choose to get vaccinated. But alas, now we're back hearing about overflowing ICUs and spiking cases. This is incredibly frustrating, as there is a solution at hand, but for whatever reason many people are refusing to embrace it.

The good news is that for our family, it still hasn't been very impactful. Most everyone we see has been smart enough to get vaccinated, so we feel relatively safe around most folks. Our biggest worry is for our kids who are still too young to be vaccinated. They will start school/daycare in a few weeks and it's looking like that may be right in the middle of what is being called the 4th wave of cases. Even if we catch a breakthrough infection it appears that the sickness will be very mild compared to if we were unvaccinated, so our worries really revolve around our kids.

Life on the ranch continues with somewhat minimal interaction besides my wife's family and a few close friends. I did take a work trip to DC and then went to a wedding last week. Besides the masks, it was the most "normal" the world felt to me in 18 months. I didn't fret about getting COVID while I was gone, but I did get tested once I got home just to be safe. I think I'll really feel better once our kids can get vaccinated, but that may still be a ways off since they're so young. The good thing about our kids being so young is that I doubt they'll have any recollection of this whole pandemic, but can still tell their grandkids in 70 years that they lived through it, which will be kind of cool for them. But really they'll have to check their great-granddad's blog to get the true first-hand account of it.

At this point I predict COVID will still be a pandemic at least for another 6 months. More employers may make the vaccine mandatory which will help, but until we can get significantly more of the population vaccinated (including school aged kids) I think COVID will be with us at least through the holidays.

A Hypothetical

A question I recently posed myself:

Could I beat an Olympic marathoner if I were to run it as a relay-race with unlimited clones of myself.

A first blush, surely I could sprint a short distance above a Olympic marathon pace, so given enough clones and short enough segments certainly I would win. But I must also factor in the slow-downs of handing off the baton, and there is where it gets interesting.

The current world record of a marathon is right around 2 hours, or 7,200 seconds (run by someone my age btw). That's about a 4:30 minute (273 seconds) mile pace. At first I figured I could sprint a 1/4 mile at a Olympic marathon pace, but I'm realistically questioning that I could run the 400 meters in 68 seconds. The Alaska state high school 400 record (assuming Alaskans are the slowest runners) is 50 seconds. So I'm thinking it would take more than 102 clones of me to win the race.

A marathon is 42,200 meters. If instead I broke it into 100 meters sections that might give me a better chance. The Olympic pace is ~17 seconds per 100 meters. Ugh. The Alaska state high school record for the 100 meter dash is 11 seconds. I bet I could run it in 14 or 15 seconds. But how much time would I lose in the baton hand-offs? I'm assuming only a second or two, which would make it a very close race.

Anything shorter than 100 meters, I thought the hand-offs would slow me (us?) down too much, anything longer I'm not sure I could keep the pace. So I think me and 421 clones of myself could run a pretty close race against an Olympic marathoner.

There are two take-aways here. One, Olympic marathoners are absolute freaks who are running twenty-six consecutive 4:30 miles. Two, it's amazing how two humans could be so disparate at something like running. How can one human's body be so much more adapt through genetics and training at something as universal as running? It blows my mind that I would have trouble running 100 meters as the same pace an Olympic marathoner runs 26 miles.

Coronavirus Part 6

My last coronavirus post was back in mid-October, in that post I predicted that we were still 6 months away from widely available vaccines. I'll give myself a point for that prediction.

In my second coronavirus post I wrote about my debate on whether to call it COVID-19 or Coronavirus and wondered which name would ultimately go down as the commonly used name. It turns out COVID was the winner, but I'm keeping the naming convention in these post titles, but I'll start calling it COVID in the post itself.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day everything shut down. In the past year 530K Americans have died of COVID, which equates to about 1 death per minute. The good news is that it's the beginning of the end. Three vaccines are available today and they appear to be effective against even the more contagious variants of COVID that have popped up. Cases are way down and about 20% of Californians have been vaccinated. When things opened back up in the summer and the fall it felt too soon but now it feels like it's the right time. There are only 10-20 new cases a day in our county with 220,000 residents. 

As for us, Carly and I have both been vaccinated. Nearly all of the adults in her family near us have been too. Last weekend for my birthday we were able to have what would seem to be a pretty normal birthday party with us all sharing pizza and brownies & ice-cream. I'm now thinking about getting my first real haircut in over a year, though I still regret cutting off my mullet.

There is talk of being able to send the kids back to school soon, and we've started planning a trip to meet up with some friends on the Oregon coast for 4th of July on the assumption that all the adults will likely be vaccinated by then. We're still keeping our social interactions to a minimum but have started to think about opening the aperture (like for a haircut). While I'm excited to get back out to public places, if I've learned anything from the past year it's that I'm a bit of a homebody these days - especially with small children.

It's hard to say when we'll finally be able to declare victory over COVID. That's probably a ways away until kids can be vaccinated, but even then I'm sure there will be pockets of cases in the news for a long time to come. It'll be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be on American society. Part of me thinks things will spring back to normal and people will carry on as they always have, but I also wonder if this will result in some major changes in how we value in-person events and activities like traveling to weddings or attending work conferences. Only time will tell.

Birthday Post #11

I really only care about social media 1 day a year. Just one day each year I indulge my vanity by counting how many people wish me happy birthday by text, e-mail and various social media sites. Well this year, that one day just happens to be the same day as National Unplugging Day, where you are supposed to put down the phone and not wish your favorite blogger happy birthday. What a cruel irony.

Despite the unplugging day, I still had pretty good birthday numbers, so thanks everyone for ignoring national unplugging day just so you could wish me happy birthday. On to the chart:

I wasn't expecting a full Rachel Morgan meter or a Ray Smith, but I was a bit surprised I didn't get called Fartface after getting one 7 of the last 8 years.  Everything else seems pretty much in-line with what I would expect.

Thanks again for the true friends of the blog who continue to wish me a happy birthday just for the stats.