Life Updates

We’ve been experiencing a weird regular ritual at the old farm-house. Starting about 3 months ago, we’ve received small food offerings on our front sidewalk every month. The items are always fresh and unopened usually consisting of milk, candy, bags of chips and the like. Once was a little strange, but this is now the third time.

I finally am back on the bike, it has been forever.

I finally have a moment with my feet up by the fire after a busy, but happy holiday sprint. Hoping that all of you had a fantastic holiday with a chance to spend time with family and loved ones!

Unfortunately, for the second time in my adult life, my house was broken into last night. I have to say that all-in-all, things are as good as could be possible in such circumstances. No one was home at the time, they were only in the house for an extremely short period of time, and of what they took, none of it had extreme monetary value.

That being said, there is truly something awful about being burglarized. In this case, the thieves took all of Grace’s jewelry boxes, which contained a few pieces of decently valuable jewelry, but also contained a large variety of keepsakes, photographs and memories. One of the boxes had actually been give to her by her daughter. And there in lies the truly dreadful thing taken by burglars. Not only do they violate that safe space that we think of as home, but they tend to take stuff that has little monetary worth but is completely priceless to the owner. They will end up callously throwing out things that the owner would give up so much to get back. And that makes them what can only best be described as scum.

Last weekend Grace, Gwen and I along with Gwen’s friend Alica took a whirlwind tour of my old stomping grounds in Chicago. We were only there for four days, so it was really a short time, but it was nice to see the place again and it was fun to act as a tour guide for Gwen and Alica on their first trip to the city of big shoulders.

So I’ve spent the whole day feeling pretty rotten, floating in and out of a NyQuil coma. However, being sick on a rainy day is good encouragement to work on some photos. These are from way back in March which should give you an idea of how far behind I am. In any case, below are a series of photo’s from Grace’s nephew Ethan’s birthday party. This ninja themed party was perfect for some great action shots though there is also something a little frightening about how much children relish a sword fight.

It’s with mixed emotions that I retire my home on the web for the last decade. When I purchased radicalwacko.com back in 2001, I was a young, aggressive Libertarian, who thought that he could and should change the world. In other words, I was an insufferable, young, recent college graduate that you wanted to avoid making eye contact with and save yourself from the pedantic lecture that would inevitably ensue.

Now as an older, crankier libertarian - who increasingly doesn’t give a damn - it starts to be embarrassing to give out a domain like radicalwacko.com. If you are over the age of 35 and still think of yourself as a radical or a wacko, you are either deluding yourself or you really probably should be on a watch list. I actually blush every time the Best Buy clerk asks me for my email address. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself why keep a domain name that you refuse to acknowledge.

As you all probably long ago guessed, I have abandoned my Project 365 photo experiment quite some time ago. It was a fun idea, but it quickly got to the point that I was forcing myself to take pictures that I didn’t like instead of feeling challenged to find subjects that I did want to photograph. I think for a lot of people the demands of such a project can bring out some great creativity, but it just started to burn me out.