Longtime readers of this blog know that there has been a fair amount of animal loss over the last few years. Wink is our last man standing. And when it’s his time to join his animal family on the other side, I’m not sure I will be ready to go right back to adding more animals.

It’s been decades and decades since I’ve lived without animals. While the joy they’ve provided me is immeasurable, I think I want to have a few years where I can feel free to travel without leaving my fur family behind or having to worry about them. We’ll see…

In the meantime, I’ve been noticing that our wild […]

The things I think about…

I’ve had to do some work recently that’s required looking at maps, which got me thinking about how map land sizes can be skewed. Which got me thinking about the times I’ve flown over oceans and couldn’t fathom their size, which got me thinking about how perception changes based on context. And then I got to thinking about how much land vs how much ocean… Well, you can see the rabbit hole I went down.

Click on this image to see full size.

Visualizing Countries by Share of Earth’s Surface

There are over 510 million square kilometers of area on the surface of […]

I overheard Cait explaining to someone recently that what I do for fun is to spend time outside, especially on windy days.  I intuitively understand the benefits of being out in nature—I don’t need scientific proof.

But if you do, there is actually a word for this: uitwaaien. “It’s basically the activity of spending time in the wind, usually by going for a walk or a bike ride. Today, the practice is so common that it’s known as ‘uitwaaien.’ It ‘literally translates to outblowing,’ explains Caitlin Meyer, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Dutch Linguistics.

In a Nautilus blog post, Alice Fleerackers […]