Category: Off topic

After a childhood of unfairly feeling tortured on likely amazing hikes, like Perseverance Lake and Deer Mountain, in Ketchikan, Alaska, I discovered the joy late as an adult, torturing my own child.

I started with crappy sneakers, not enough water and heading out with an empty stomach and without much of a plan, and I too slowly learned what worked well for me. This is my contribution to the collection of “how I do a thing” posts on the internet that someone might find helpful.

Eating breakfast

This might seem like a no brainer, but I spent a while hiking on an empty stomach before I learned it wasn’t the best. Some it was that I always ran before eating, so why would I need to eat before a day of hiking? (These are the kind of insightful hiking tips I will have for you on this list.) Bringing lunch for the trail was also a revelation.

Real boots

I started hiking in lightweight sneakers better geared towards trail running. Turned out when I bought a pair of hiking boots, my feet and ankles were actually protected and supported. “Get new hiking boots” was one of my goals for the year in 2020, and it was accomplishable.

Pack with water bladder

I always thought the folks with the little drinking tubes sticking out of their packs looked kinda doofy, and, when I finally decided I should get something to carry, you know, food with me, I we determined not to fall for a dumb hydration thing. The guy at the outdoor store convinced me I was wrong, and I am now convinced he was right. Even with my Ospry Manta 28, I still carry a water bottles with me on longer hikes, but it’s a lot easier to drink water when it’s right under my chin. It’s also been great to have a comfortable pack with enough space that I can bring along enough food for lunch and snacks, rain or cold weather gear, quadcopter or whatever else for the day.

Trekking poles

When we went inn-to-inn hiking in the Rockies five years ago, Phoebe loaned us poles, which were another accessory I was convinced was super dumb. Turns out it makes it easier to go up or down way more comfortable. They’re really helpful for scrambling up steep slopes, but also a lifesaver as you head down steep rocks at the end of a long day.

Sock liners

Much of my hiking growth has been allowing myself to accept substance over style. What’s cooler than two pairs of socks? Everything, but blisters suck.

Hiking pants

There are folks who swear by convertible pants, but my opinion is they are bad pants and bad shorts. I’ve liked my pair of Kuhl Renegade Rock Pants, but I’m sure there are better options, so try some things on.

WorkOutDoors

You want to know I secret? I never look at a map on the trail. This is a dumb thing that has led me to make wrong turns, add extra miles and get just sort of lost. I recently added this app, all of $6, to my gear and it’s been worth every penny. You can add GPX and other file types (created with, say, Caltopo or downloaded from AllTrails) for maps to your iPhone (and Apple Watch).

Has GPS made us lazy and myopic? Absolutely, but it sure is nice to just hike.

The first image released from the Webb telescope offered the deepest view humans have had yet into the universe, showing light that is 4.6 billion years old.

There’s a alternate universe where religion has a long and rich history of respect for scientific inquiry since science allows us to see the grand order of the natural world, glimpse the true awesomeness of the universe and know humanity’s fundamental inability to comprehend it all.

During the summer of 2008, I worked in the newsroom of the now-defunct Tampa Tribune. It was once considered cutting edge, with a converged newsroom for its newspaper, television and online operations. Wow! Anyway, I helped produce multimedia — “what’s an audio slideshow?” my 16-year-old recently asked me as I instantly aged a million years — and launched TBOextra.com, an entertainment site (tbo.com was the cutting edge domain for the website, short for “Tampa Bay Online”). I just pulled the piece I wrote for the launch, published Aug. 4, from the Wayback Machine and wanted to save it here.

TAMPA – The allure of Las Vegas, that city’s tourism flacks will tell you, is its collection of celebrity chefs and world-class shopping.

We beg to differ. Vegas isn’t nicknamed Sin City because it has a Barney’s New York. The foundation of the city’s fame is gambling, flashy entertainment and lots of flesh.

But the economic downturn and the rise of gas and air travel costs have meant that visitors to Vegas are having less fun (and by “having fun” we mean “gambling”; in May, gambling revenues were down more than 15 percent from a year ago). Coincidentally, we’ve been saddled with the atrocious coinage “staycation” to describe a stay-at-home vacation.

Which got us thinking: Who needs to travel to Vegas? You can have the same fun without leaving the Tampa area.

Well, sort of.

For a change of scenery during your next stay-at-homer, we offer an itinerary of sorts: a night in Vegas … in Tampa Bay.

Noon: Go crazy
If Vegas was built on gambling, its dining scene — no matter how alluring to the foodie set it may have become — was built on buffets. So start the night with a bite at Crazy Buffet. You won’t find the standard Vegas cheap-‘n’-greasy, but for $15.99 you can gorge yourself on the buffet’s weekend brunch, featuring a steak hibachi, sushi and sashimi. (After 5 p.m., the buffet switches to dinner and the cost goes to $19.99.)

1 p.m.: A Vegas landmark
Tourists love getting their picture taken in front of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign on the south end of the strip, says Alicia Malone, a public relations representative for the Las Vegas visitor’s bureau. Yeah, it sounded like a pretty lame attraction to us, too. But since you’re spending a night in Vegas on the Bay, you might as well swing by a Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino “Vegas-Style Slots” billboard for a picture. One is located on Busch Boulevard near Interstate 275.

1:30 p.m.: Serious gaming
With a meal and a tourist photo out of the way, you’re ready to move on to the most Vegas-y event of the day: sitting and mindlessly playing the slots at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino for hours on end. While the casino doesn’t offer many card games, it does offer poker if slots aren’t your thing.

5 p.m.: A little flesh
What would a night out in Vegas be without a little flesh? (Answer: Phoenix, Ariz.) The Penthouse Club Steakhouse offers one variety of flesh on a plate and another on a pole. The prices can be a little, er, stiff — $45 for a 12-ounce aged New York strip steak — but you’re here for the food, right? (If you show up after 8 p.m. only to consume the Penthouse stripping, and not the steak, it’s $10 to get in.)

7:30 p.m.: A Tampa landmark
Tampa’s answer to Wayne Newton is Johnny Charro. Charro no longer performs in Bay area hotel ballrooms as he did when he was 40 years younger. Instead, he makes regular appearances at the American Legion and Tampa Bay Sports Grille. The setting may be less elegant (and the cocktail waitresses not up to Vegas standards), but Charro is still a crooner and a charmer — at least, if you find pudgy crooners charming.

9 p.m.: Fountains
Vistors to Las Vegas, our Vegas tourism expert assures us, love the Bellagio fountains on the strip, where they can watch the water come alive as it dances to nauseatingly melodramatic Celine Dion songs. On your way back from the Charro show, you’ll want to stop by the fountains in front of the Fox 13 studios on Kennedy Boulevard. Actually, you won’t — they’re painted swimming-pool blue and have no water in them — but it’s as close to the Bellagio’s fountains as the Bay gets, unless you count the flooding on south Howard after a good summer drenching.

9:30 p.m.: Artificial fun
You can’t have the true Vegas experience without spending some time in an artificial environment built solely for amusement. The Las Vegas strip has New York, New York, but the Bay has the world’s largest bowling pin and the rest of the supremely cheesy Channelside Bay Plaza. (Full disclosure: The Tampa Tribune and TBO.com have a business arrangement with the plaza.) Options for late night entertainment include Splitsville, a combination bowling alley, bar and restaurant, and Howl at the Moon, a lounge with dueling pianos. Stump’s Supper Club features a shag-carpet-covered stage and house band Jimmy James and the Velvet Explosion. Cirque du Soleil they are not.

You’re in good shape to ride out the night in Channelside and let whatever happens happen — because for one night, at least, what happens in Tampa Bay, stays in Tampa Bay. Not that it does you any good when you get home.

A review of a past future year in review:

To start with the obvious: this year was better than last year, mostly because coming out of deadly, mismanaged pandemic is better that going into one.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t come out.

I don’t want this review of the past year to get bogged down with schadenfreude, such as Trump’s ongoing criminal proceedings but it helped. The arc of justice blah blah blah. 

Nor do I wat to relive the horrific Iowa legislative session with its rightward push to move public dollars to private schools and reinstating the death penalty by folks who identify as pro-life.

There wasn’t nearly as much movement on any of these items as I expected, for good and for ill. The state government was pretty bad, though.

The first half of the year was very much 2020 2.0: excessive death caused by denial, entitlement and exceptionalism.

We saw more deaths from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, and we’ve let 1 in 100 of our seniors die from the disease.

But by summer that changed. Fewer dying people (good!), but with understandable pandemic fatigue, FOMO was on the rise. 

If 2020 was the year of the introverts, 2021 was the year of fighting off the extroverts.

And so, after my much-anticipated second vaccine dose, I was lured out by friends to enjoy my first meal at a restaurant in more than a year. 

This was kinda true. I ate in a restaurant in early July and felt pretty much OK! But: still lots of death.

Well, enjoyed is too strong of a word. 

I actually did enjoy it. I miss restaurants, but I like not being sick a lot, too.

But everyone else everywhere wanted to do everything in person. Meetings that had rightfully become emails or phone calls were, again, meetings. Everyone wanted to host a cocktail hour, lunch-and-learn or some sort of celebration. If it wasn’t celebrating this year’s birthday (Wait, we’re still eating cake after someone has blown all over it? Have we learned nothing?), it was re-celebrating last year’s missed anniversaries.

Everyone did want to switch to in-person events, though some were still hybrid through the fall. Feels like we’re in a real fuck-it mode right now as the year ends.

It’s not to say that I wasn’t glad to finally be able to see people in person. Thanksgiving and Christmas, my two favorite secular holidays, were better spent in my parents’ living room than spread across Iowa and Illinois, though I did miss the joy of the low-key aspects of the previous year’s pandemic holidays.

We actually traveled — on an airplane! — for Thanksgiving. And Christmas gathering was proceeded by rapid antigen and PCR tests. It was still pretty low key.

I’ve never been a fan of the pervasive “good riddance to [current year]” — the annual refrain suggests we have no real baseline — but 2021 was only marginally better than the year before, so good riddance.

This is 100 percent accurate. Good riddance, 2021.