Ryan's Journal

“Have you left on your road trip yet?” has been a popular question of late.

“No” has been the only accurate answer.

“When are you leaving?” and “What have you been doing?” have been the equally-popular follow-up questions.

“Probably Thursday” and “Absolutely nothing” have been my very happy responses.

In this case, “absolutely nothing” really is what it sounds like – aside from just under two hours of work on JAMWiki code and this journal entry, the past two days have been filled with naps, a game, and a couple of CPK frozen pizzas. While regressing into a waste of life might normally be cause for scorn and self-loathing, after a mostly-unbroken stretch of working for Backcountry, working on side-projects, and trying to have a social life, this new (and hopefully short-lived) degeneration into worthlessness seems to be having a restorative “reset” effect; burnout is ever-so-slowly giving way to a renewed desire to go out into the world and shake things up.

After an inglorious eleven months, tomorrow will be the last day working for backcountry.com until at least January. The contract was only supposed to last through March, but unsurprisingly it got extended and likely would have gone on even longer if I hadn’t begged for some time away to focus on other pending projects. In a perfect world some of those projects may actually be taken care of by the end of the year, but a gambling man would be smart to wager that 2011 will still start with an extensive TODO list.

Since the side projects only require a laptop and an occasional internet connection, and since it’s been far too long since I spent any significant length of time dirty and living in the back of a Subaru, the coming month will likely also involve a road trip to one or more of the seven remaining states on the not-yet-visited list. Luckily, with the notable exception of North Dakota, the states on that list are mostly OK for cold weather visits, so December may be the month when I finally take a riveting vacation to… Kansas. I’m surprisingly excited about this possibility – while traveling abroad has been incredible, one of the many reasons why living in the US is great is that there is amazing variety here, and even a state with a less-than-stellar reputation as a travel destination will almost certainly have its share of interesting spots. The other stupendous and exciting states on the yet-to-be-visited list are Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, so possibilities abound for gumbo, Forrest Gump analogies, and whatever it is that one does in Mississippi.