Travel: Catching Up

TORONTO, ONTARIO - When I left home for what proved to be five weeks of travel around the new year, the vast majority of the blog posts that occurred during that time were focused on the experiences I was having as I traveled. As a result, I gradually collected a list of things that I would have written about that were effectively "bumped" by the travelogues. Yesterday, I finally cleared that backlog.

That, of course, was not the only backlog from that travel. My mail was piling up for five weeks. I had five Christian Science Monitors and four Chemical & Engineering News issues waiting to be read, along with other mail. Only this morning did I finally clear the stack of newspapers, and now I can start working down the other reading stacks. Podcasts? I think I had 2.5 days worth of programming backlogged when I returned six weeks ago. It's down to about half that now. Railfanning notes? That's a complicated one since I still had material from 2005 to catch up on, but suffice to say I've only written up what I saw after the New Year on my recent trip. Pictures? Those paying attention will notice that I still haven't presented the pictures from Arizona yet.

The fact that one can spend a much longer time dealing with the aftermath of a trip than one spent traveling in the first place is a reality that I have long loathed. Some people deal with it by intentionally taking a few days of home vacation after traveling (in some sense, I have that but taking a job search seriously is much more like telecommuting to a job than being on vacation). Most of the time, one just has to gradually catch up as I have been doing. There's a reason why I preferred to only spend 25% of my time or less traveling (on business or pleasure); three-quarters of time was about enough to catch up and stay sane.

In any event, now that the blog is in some sense caught up, it may quite often be less than daily. It is clear to me that quality of writing and topics has suffered of late; I'll be writing only when I think I can present something well, even if it means a few days are skipped.