Exploring the American Landscape
Shannon 
Eagle-eyed readers will recognize that I haven’t posted in months, since our year-end review. Spring is my busiest time of year, and this year we’ve been unusually busy, though we probably feel that way every year. In any case I was inspired to write after seeing several news articles noting that AI slop now comprises … Read more
The big story of last year (2024) was our change of venue from Florida to North Carolina, with all the tumult that moving and changing states entails. Things were a lot calmer in 2025, since we were mainly focused on getting established in our new community. We already knew several people before we moved here, … Read more
While it may be an exaggeration to characterize trips lasting fewer than 48 hours as “road trips,” we rounded out our 2025 travel with two short road trips to the mountains. While brief, our third and fourth mountain getaways of the year took us back to places we visited earlier in the summer, but with … Read more
Immediately after completing our two short trips to the mountains in May and June we got to work on planning visits to the beach. As noted in my prior post, we are following the wisdom of the local crowds, since mountain and beach trips are summer staples in this area. We checked out two different … Read more
Moving to Winston-Salem has given us two new calendars to govern our lives. The first is the seasonal cycle, featuring four honest-to-goodness seasons, each with distinctive delights and challenges. The other is the academic calendar. Several of my volunteer activities are university-affiliated, and my library gig is work-from-home this summer while renovations are happening on … Read more