Keeper of notes

For ten years I have used Google Keep to serve several key functions in my life. While I do still bookmark pages in Chrome, they quickly become unwieldy, and Keep serves as my repository of "important" pages I want to remember. Tagging helps me keep them in buckets, of sorts. Checklists for shutting down the house in Door County or Downers Grove, To-Do lists, restaurant lists, shopping lists and more are quick to create, duplicate and re-use. I also often jot poetry or story ideas as they occur. 

With over 1800 entries, my thoughts about Bookmarks in Chrome being unwieldy might be inaccurate, but Keep is a treasure chest that I wanted to mine with the help of AI.

My query:

Thinking like an expert personal coach with extensive experience helping Fortune 500 C-suite executive retirees plan their next chapter in retirement in their 50's, knowing that cycling, writing and photography are passions, review my 5+ years of Google Keep notes in the attached document. The "More List" found within it is important as that is a brainstorm of things I enjoy that I want more of in my retirement life.

What are the Top 5 themes you find, what are hidden opportunities for growth and learning, and overall insights can you make about me based on this review. I use Keep as a way to bookmark items to return to, a way to keep checklists, and sometimes a way to capture snippets of poetry. It is how I capture what comes to me online.

Help me increase the things I want more of and present an actionable plan for "better living" based on your review. The deliverables for this are:

1. An executive summary

2. A detailed review of findings

3. Discussion of these findings

4. An action plan for better living based on the findings

Full disclosure: I wasn't a Fortune 500 C-suite, my VP job was in a small privately-held company, but I wanted professional "help". I wanted the notes to be analyzed with a bit more gravitas I suppose. So indulge me my delusions of grandeur.  Still, with 7 patents, over 1 million miles of travel, and work in 20 countries revolutionizing how vision is tested, I should be permitted a small delusion. 

Before I retired, as I journaled and worked through the process of determining if it was time to exit and my thoughts and emotions about it, I created a list of things I wanted more of in my life. My "More List". So that I have it everywhere, the list is in Keep and has things as simple as s'mores, dogs, convertibles, cycling and about 20 things I love, many of which were pushed to the periphery in my career and constant travel. These are the North Star of what I want out of retirement, and there is friction internally: 

I'm not doing better doing the things I profess to want more of. 

 

I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. Grok, largely because I've not spent much time with it, and the others because I'm a daily user. The results, interestingly, were similar. I don't have a clear favorite. Often I prefer Claude for its depth and clarity. Claude knows me best as I've provided it the clearest picture, but in this case ChatGPT states it most clearly and right upfront: 

You Are Quietly Reconstructing an Identity Around Creativity This is the dominant theme by far. Not creativity as productivity. Creativity as identity.

I think if this blog is any indication, that is definitely work in progress. 

I decided to do a bit of meta analysis of the results and took all 4 of the "answers" and provided them back to Grok to review. Why Grok? I wanted a referee that I don't have history with. I feel the answers it returned  were solid.

Analyzing where they agree:

Claim Creative Identity Publicly and Shift to Output: Stop collecting; start completing and sharing 

Permission and Receiving: Grant yourself permission to spend time/energy/joy on the “More List” without earning it. 

 

Refreshingly, "There is remarkably little “bad” advice— all outputs are thoughtful and well-calibrated."  Phew! 

Looking at the concrete advice for a daily plan: 

1. Morning ritual (30–60 min protected): Writing/poetry/journaling (Modern Wisdom prompts) + tactile start (coffee ritual, bread shaping, calligraphy). No screens first. This is going to be the hardest. I always start my day with coffee and the Wall Street Journal.
2. One micro-action: Short walk with Gus, poem snippet, or photo. The smallest action I can take to move me forward - alright - let's go!
3. Evening wind-down: Sensory pleasure (fire, drink, music, reading) + brief gratitude/reflection. I do enjoy a drink and a book. I can do this!
4. Track aliveness/joy (1–10) simply Honestly, I like this. I had a friend that would call out "joy" when she discovered it, so this resonates!

As I said in my post Kevin Butler and the Temple of Doom Scrolling I need to stop defaulting to picking up the phone and scrolling. I'm trying harder to read more, but protecting my creative output, not asking permission to work on the projects that I want to nurture needs to be a priority as June approaches. 2026 is nearly half done and I have little output to show for it save these posts. Consider this a step to that future. 

Note: If you'd like to try this yourself, export your Google Keep to a Google Doc, save the resulting document as a docx, upload to the various AI, use my query edited to your own passions and your own "More" list, and see what returns. I don't believe you'll be disappointed. Let me know in the comments what you discover!

Unprinted

1982-3 Konica Auto S2

There was that stack of 4x6 prints that came back from every roll after a patient wait of a week, maybe two. Twenty-four or thirty-six of them, plus a second set for whoever you wanted to share the moment with. Clark. Seattle Film Works, big labs. Sometimes you wanted them fast. Walgreens would have them to you in an hour!  You put them in albums, stuck the best ones to the refrigerator with magnets, and for the really good ones, you had them enlarged and framed and hung somewhere that mattered.

I wanted to be a photographer when I was a kid. Not just someone who took pictures on a Kodak 126 Instamatic or even a 110 (wow were those grainy at 4x6!) — a photographer. I read the books, waited anxiously for the latest issue of Popular Photography, studied the gear, poured over the advertisements, even shot with my uncle who was a pro and developed prints in his own studio. I won ribbons at the Illinois State Fair for my 4-H projects. I had a Konica Auto S2, a late-60s rangefinder that taught me everything I know about light, about framing. When I was in 8th grade, my dad and I bought a used Pentax ME Super SLR. It was a dream come true! Photography wasn't going to be my career — I think my parents and teachers knew my talents were better engaged in other pursuits — but it was intertwined with how I saw the world. I wanted, no, I needed to capture it.

I resisted digital longer than most. My friend Bryn brought a Canon PowerShot to France while I packed a Pentax film SLR, and for a while I could honestly say my prints were sharper, could enlarge larger, were just better. Eventually that stopped being true, and I caved — a Kodak superzoom with real exposure control, good white balance, terrible high ISO. I shared travel photos via Picasa, sent travelogue emails to friends, kept the ritual of it. For twenty years I moved photos from card to hard drive to hard drive, computer to computer, dutifully carrying the archive forward.

Unprinted photo

I now have 200,000 photographs. Probably many more than that. And I have little to show for them — nothing tangible printed in nearly a decade, nothing on a refrigerator. Sharing with friends is a process of sharing a photo from a trip, them giving a Thumbs Up, and that’s the end of the journey. There is no frame. There is no refrigerator that bears witness. What I have is a phone I flip through at the brewery, trying to skip past the embarrassing ones while hunting for a single decent selfie to show friends. Two hundred thousand moments, and I'm scrolling past them in a bar.

That's not photography.

I'm retired now, which means I have no more excuses. I've started going back through the archive. I'm learning darktable, improving my composition and post-processing, trying to become the photographer I told myself I'd be someday. The work is at imatalossforwords.com if you want to follow along.

But more than the processing, more than the software — I'm going to print. I'm going to put something on a wall. I'm going to create the tangible.

Homeward Bound

 

I woke to warm humid air and unfamiliar bird calls after arriving in Fort Myers yesterday to begin what will be a road trip back to Chicago with my mother-in-law's car. After surviving 3 feet of snow last month, and heavy rain this month, the palm trees and heavy air feel welcoming. There is a tentativeness to wearing shorts again. Will it last?

There is no doubt in my mind that I'm a Midwesterner through and through. The dark nights of December and January, the bitter cold that is difficult to explain, the feel of shoveling for the fourth time with the realization it still isn't "enough". However, it is nice to get away. Leave it briefly. Appreciate what we do have between the snowflakes and drifts.

The mailbox is finally straight. It took a new post and a sledgehammer, but it stands proudly again, waiting to get the junk mail and Amazon packages. A sledgehammer. Just part of the Wisconsin toolkit.

There is a road trip ahead, though. And I'm excited about that. We didn't fly when I was a kid. So I've done road trips crisscrossing the country. I continued this in college marching band with bus trips to Florida, Texas and all over the Big 10 with 350 of my best friends strung along 7 motorcoaches. Our honeymoon was a big long drive to Glacier NP, driving back from Cut Bank MT to Freeport IL in one big long day. Needless to say, I didn't do the majority of the driving. 

Modern road trips are different, though. Podcasts. Buc-ees. Quality coffee. Fancy Maple Cherry jerky. New flavors for Cheez Its even! Still, though, Waffle House, Denny's, Cracker Barrel and state Welcome Centers form the backbone. There will still be madcap pursuits such as driving across the state of Florida for lunch with friends from Wisconsin and dinner with our Mexico gang in Georgia. Too much junk food will be consumed and by Kentucky I'll already be calculating how many long bike rides it is going to take to burn off the calories consumed. The Cheez Itz will require careful attention of a car wash vacuum to eradicate from between the seats.

There is always an element of surprise on a trip. A view we didn't expect. Or a small bit of US History we never knew. A mural on the side of a building. Amidst the jerky, Pringles, and Milk Duds will be a small moment that comes unheralded and will be what is remembered. I'm ready for it.

Recovering the Satellites

 It is mid-April in Door County WI.  We had 33" of snow melt quickly, followed by rain upon rain, and finished, for now, with thunderstorms last night. There's water coming in our basement. We're in that cycle of moving fans and shop-vaccing the floors every 15 or 20 minutes trying to keep things under some degree of control. 

We purchased our first home in late 1996. After several years of apartment life we were excited to have a small two-bedroom one-bath house in the heart of Downers Grove, walking distance to the train and shopping. It felt small-town, but with every advantage of suburban living. Working in Chicago, the proximity to Metra was perfect for me. 

If I think about the important albums in that period of my life, there are really but two, and both from Counting Crows.  In the mid-90's they were at their apex.  Adam Duritz spoke to the loneliness I felt even within the largest city I would call home. August and Everything After saw me through the end of college, the beginning of adult life, corporate trainings, and the feelings of being an outsider despite being in the middle of everything. 

It was serendipity that their follow-up Recovering the Satellites came out days before we purchased the house, newly married, and fresh into a team-change at work. We had entertained serious notions of moving to the Bay Area, rendezvousing with good friends, and taking some time out of the Midwest. After a visit over Labor Day weekend, largely scouting out if this was our next chapter, we got off the plane in Chicago, looked at the other and realized we were Midwesterners, and that evening after going to bed, our phone rang. It was our realtor. A house we'd made an offer on in May was back on the market. It was our dream house. It was the final sign we needed. 

So our introduction to what real home-ownership meant was in February 1997. Some heavy rain on frozen ground left us battling 15+ inches of water in our basement. We fought it as best we could with our portable sump-pumps, newly purchased at Home Depot, until we just had salvage what we could, and make some peace with it. Kim headed to Indy to see friends. I fought a bit longer before heading into the city for a party with friends. My soundtrack for all of that was Recovering the Satellites. On repeat. 

We'd go on to have this fight over the years with our little house until 2013 when all of the skills we'd learned were for naught, 8 inches of rain fell on frozen ground, a creek in the neighborhood flooded from poor management by the village of Downers Grove, and we woke to 4 feet of water in the basement, and a flooded backyard and garage. We'd see our 3 cars towed away. We'd need the help of family, friends and neighbors to clean up the damage. It would be months of work before we were back to normal. 

In the aftermath we re-graded the yard, fixed what needed fixing, but flooding rains still cause a deep-seated anxiety that is hard to shake. 

As I keep the fans moving and the shop-vac sucking up as much water as I can, I'm playing Recovering the Satellites and thinking about the passage of nearly 30 years. Have you seen me lately? 

Kevin

+

Loss of Signal

Last evening I was watching the NASA coverage of Artemis II as the astronauts passed behind the moon and lost radio contact with Earth. I watched as their orbit caused Earth to blink out of sight and for the next 40-ish minutes they were out of contact. The coverage had a segment about what the moon meant to each of the astronauts and it got me thinking of my childhood, well high school really, interest in space that was born in a galaxy far far away when I was 6 and Luke Skywalker was my hero.

It made me wonder why now that I have dark Door County skies why I'm not out more with my telescope, looking at the moon or Jupiter or Andromeda.  I've become more involved with the Door Peninsula Astronomical Society and now coordinating the monthly speakers at our meetings. I'm enjoying making new friends and learning new science, but I need to get out in my own backyard and wander the sky. 

I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Lisle, IL. I had my first apartment here after I graduated from the University of Illinois and spent over two years here, writing my 20 Poems for Sad Lonely Evenings from an apartment on Ogden Avenue, dating my now wife, hanging only a dart board on the beige walls, and riding the train daily to the city and spending another day with my FS90 team at Arthur Andersen. I reunited last night with some of my old AA friends, shared some beers, and watched Michigan win the NCAA tournament, but mostly told stories of the old days with a lot of talk on how we're using AI in our jobs or personal lives.

Caught between the world I used to inhabit and the retirement I'm still learning to navigate, I’m frustrated with my lack of doing, the metaphor of being out of contact, sailing around the dark of the moon, seemed appropriate. I’m out of contact with the mission control that had guided me before. I’m awaiting regaining the signal, but for now I can only wonder at a world that is only visible to me. For 30 years, there was a plan for every day, goals to achieve, flights to catch, systems to design, build, install and train. The meetings, the emails, the responsibility of it all, was prescribed and I could execute the mission before me.

Now, I’m out of contact with that world. There is no pressure to do to produce to accomplish. I’m sleeping better. I don’t wake with a panic attack worried about an issue on the other side of the world. But I’m out of contact and hoping to regain contact, even if the mission control has changed.

My telescope gear is all in the garage, just waiting on me. A clear night, 15 minutes of set-up and I’d be floating above the moon as those Artemis II astronauts make their way home. They knew they’d come out of the darkness, resume their radio contact, and start on their journey, homeward bound. I wish I had that same assurance that mission control is timing my exit, ready to pick me back up and guide me home.

I don't have an answer right now. Just a lingering frustration with my prioritization. I'll write soon on my "More List", but for now I need to move this all from thought to action. Only I can create what comes next. I'm genuinely asking: how do you move from wanting to doing?

Vibe Coding to my Travel Map

 

Every dot is a location I've been and taken a photo. When you see it all on a page it shows just how much is left to see!

I spent my career in technology. A 9 year run at Arthur Andersen working on development of a large financial system and then Lotus Notes, Sametime and QuickPlace along with building out a webcasting video platform long before YouTube, Teams, Messenger and Slack came along. Long forgotten names that came out just a few years ahead of their time.

I was fortunate to spend that time with an amazing team and still 24 years after we all worked together miss the camaraderie. I went from that through a winding and dim tunnel to arrive at M&S Technologies where I'd spend the next 21 years, building out solutions for optometry and ophthalmology with our Smart System 2 systems, CTS and SSVR. 

All this to say I've spent a lot of time in software development, much of it prototyping new tech and getting things through proof-of-concept and ready for "real" developers who I'd then attempt to manage. Despite doing COBOL, C++, C# and some Java professionally, it wasn't my strength. Now retired and looking for some winter entertainment I've been experimenting with Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT - building book ideas, designing blog templates, and finally tackling the 200,000+ photos I've taken over 30 years.

With GPS Data embedded in the EXIF data in many of my photos I tried Gemini to extract the data so that I could see some nerdy photographer data like which focal lengths I prefer, but I also extracted the locations.  I had Gemini write Python code that I could then modify to better suit me and arrived at a pretty great map of my travels. 

I've loved to travel since I was a young kid and did some amazing road trips around the US as a child. My adult life had me traveling both personally, but always hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles professionally. I'm a Million Miler on United, with another 300,000-400,000 miles on assorted other carriers. I really wanted to see it all laid out - the visual record of my adult life on a map.

Realizing that there were photos in Google Photos that weren't on my PC I looked for ways to extract the information from Google, but they make it hard to extract locations because of privacy concerns.  However, Google Takeout lets you download everything with JSON files for photos with information that can then be analyzed.  After a bit of trial and error and eliminating a few spurious locations such as Null Island I had my map!

Null Island, for geography nerds is 0°,0° where the Prime Meridian intersects the Equator. Sometimes rather than inserting a Null or NA or just nothing, the EXIF data will get 0,0 which is then mapped to this location off the south coast of Ghana. 

Having worked in 45 states and visited all 50, and done the same in nearly 20 countries while visiting another 35 on the 6 major continents I thought I had seen a good chunk of the world. When you see it all out there, though, it shows just how much left to see there is. Hopefully the world political climate will change in the years ahead some big areas of this map will be filled in with more color. There's still so much more to see and so few years yet to see it!

Vibe coding the Python needed to do this was absurdly fun.  It probably helps that I know how to describe what a program should do after decades of explaining features and functions to talented developers, but I was stunned at just how quickly it could generate code.  I've worked on some Android apps in Android Studio connected to Gemini and in a few hours put together an app that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to write from scratch. It is mind boggling.

I started by asking Gemini to write a Python script to extract all of the EXIF data to a CSV that can easily imported into Excel. Then I had it write a second script to extract the GPS data and create the map.  Realizing that a lot of my photos from my phone were in Google Photos I faced the challenge that I could not just have Gemini extract the information already in Googles ecosystem. I had to download all of the files.  225 GB worth of photos! 114 zip files.  It took nearly 12 hours to create the zips and all morning to download them! Then another script to extract the data, create a new map and see where I'd been! Once I understood how it worked, I added some locations that I visited where I didn't have GPS data in the photos and arrived at a finished map. 

It is a bit humbling to see it all in one image. 

Detailed US map where the lines of interstates  I-80, I-90, I-10, I-40 and more are clearly shown indicating road trips across the country!

I'm not sure what this means for new CS students and grads. It is great so much can be generated, but debugging and optimizing? I think my University of Illinois education still gives me the tools to know what to do, but how soon will I be superfluous? Oh, I'm retired. Question answered.

Kevin

Collecting

As a kid, I was never able to collect anything. No—I take that back. I had a small penny collection. For a few weeks, my dad brought home rolls of pennies and sometimes nickels, and we’d search for wheat-back pennies and any missing coins from my little brown, fold-up book. I had most of the pennies between 1956 and 1982, and a few steel wartime cents.

I think it was the prospect of finding the needle in the haystack that propelled me—that if I searched hard enough, I’d find something valuable nestled in a paper tube with 49 other cents.

But baseball cards? Hot Wheels? Matchbox cars? Knives? No. Sure, we had Star Wars action figures, but just enough to act out adventures, arriving at random birthdays or holidays.

Maybe my mild hoarding—random and scattershot as it is—is a way of collecting. A collection of the everyday. Tic Tac boxes. Altoids tins. Every book I’ve purchased. Am I secretly building a unified collection of ephemera? Or am I just a mild hoarder?

I thought maybe I’d found my way into collecting with watches. After getting into a watch podcast in 2019, I joined a community of enthusiasts and, over time, doubled the number of watches in my drawer. Was I becoming a collector? Once the number crossed ten, was I officially one?

Let’s take a step back. I’ve worn a watch nearly every day since I was six. Without giving away too much, I’m well past that now—well beyond the halfway point.

When I was struggling with anxiety over my parents moving again, they gave me a small 28mm Timex manual-wind watch so that, at school, I could always know how long it would be until they came back for me. If that sounds ridiculous, consider this: I went to three kindergartens before I turned six. Anxiety has always been a feature of my life. So have watches.

I still have almost every watch I’ve ever worn. Early digital. Early ani-digi. Manual. Quartz. Automatic—they’re all in a box.

But is it a collection? I don’t know. I don’t part with things. Books. Bikes. Cameras. Telescopes. Watches. I don’t cycle through them—I keep them.

The longer I’ve spent in the enthusiast world, the more I’ve realized watches are an accessory to my life—maybe more a touchstone—but I’m not enthused the way others are. I don’t debate whether something should be 1mm larger or smaller. Thinner. Lighter. Blue. Pink. Purple. I’m not fixated on Swiss or Japanese or German. And as an early retiree, Rolex or Omega is probably out of reach anyway.

Lately, I’ve started to think I might be done collecting watches.

But I do love them. I love wearing them. I love knowing that certain pieces have been with me on particular adventures, at pivotal moments. If I had to run into the house for anything—after my wife, dog, and passport—it would be that early Timex and a cheap-ish quartz Tissot chronograph that’s been with me to 30-plus countries.

And maybe that’s the answer. Maybe what I collect isn’t watches—it’s the moments attached to them.

Completeness in travel matters to me. I’ve been to all 50 U.S. states—finished just after turning 35. I’ve worked in 45 states, plus Puerto Rico. I’ve worked in nearly 20 countries, across all six “major” continents, plus the subcontinent. Antarctica is still out there, and I can feel the pull of it—the need to complete the set.

I’ve even had a Wisconsin Old Fashioned in every supper club in Door County.

So maybe I was wrong at the start. Maybe I’m not a collector of things, or even a mild hoarder. Maybe I just collect differently.

Not baseball cards. Not Matchbox cars.

Experiences. Places. Moments.

Maybe that’s enough.

Kevin Butler - London 2021

Through the storm

On Saturday night, a winter storm swept over the Door peninsula. We woke to inches of snow that even bi-hourly shoveling and blowing could not constrain. By Sunday afternoon, the snow was more than the snowblower could handle and I was reduced to shoveling a path out the door and a spot for Gus to use as his winter latrine. He was not amused with the 35+ mph winds and driving snow. 

Monday the blizzard continued and despite putting in trails the snow was hip-deep in the yard. Tuesday we were due to drive to Chicago for the Matt Berninger concert at Park West, but we had 3-4 feet drifts across our drive and our cars were snowed in. Finally on Wednesday afternoon, 3/18/2026, we were plowed and set free!

It is a strange feeling being snow-bound. Not even being able to walk to the road except through hip-deep snow. It is quiet. There are no cars. The only sound is the wind blowing at 35 miles per hour, building the snow into more than it seemed. More than the record-setting 33 inches. The lack of traffic feels like early in the lock-down in 2020. Where nothing moved. Except this would have an end. The snow will indeed melt. Most likely soon. But nothing moved. 

I trudged through the drifts to the garage and then to the bird feeder. It isn't not the birds' fault that Mother Nature covered their thawing ground leaving them without much food. Within hours they were huddled under the feeder or on the feeder, taking turns, refueling. 

The snow will melt. Spring will come. We'll joke about this in the years to come. But for now, it feels like all of us here survived something. 

Kevin

The drive and porch

The road with limited visibility

Looking north

The garage is unreachable

The best path I could dig

After the storm, a wonderful sunset on Monday afternoon

 

King Tut's Tomb

Just over a year ago I had the privilege to go to Egypt, see the Pyramids and cruise the Nile from Luxor. Having wanted to visit the Valley of the Kings since childhood, getting to descend into King Tut's Tomb was a culmination of many dreams. I'll have more to say about Egypt in the days ahead, but for now the pictures are at my photo and poetry blog imatalossforwords.com

Descending into King Tut's Tomb

Kevin Butler and the Temple of Doom Scrolling

Mexico 2026

One of my resolutions for 2026 was to stop endless scrolling on my phone. At just over two months into the year it is time to take stock of the progress or lack thereof. I would argue that I'm not a "Doomscroller" really. Really I'm not.  I'm just a news junkie. Or maybe in these current times it is important to stay on top of the news. I wonder what is happening in Iran right now. I should go check.

Ok, I'm back. Nothing new in the headlines. 

I got rid of the Google News feed from my phone so I'm not being pulled down that rabbit hole. Google knows me well enough to serve up a smörgåsbord of interesting stories from cycling and photography to early retirement and technology. It was easy to get pulled in for an hour when I just planned to "check the news". But the WSJ app? The Daily Mail for my UK tabloid press? Those are still there to pull me back. And if that weren't enough, a Slack group with channels neatly tailored to nearly all of my interests.

The James Bond films were not part of my childhood. Between the lothario James Bond and his questionable, one might argue, "morals", I missed the classics. So in 2026 I have endeavored to go through them in order to see what I was missing. I loved the Ian Fleming novels. I sped through them one summer so quickly I should probably read the cycle again. I guess where I'm heading with this, is that while watching the Bond films, I find my attention drawn away to my phone. What's new? What's interesting? What watch should I buy next? Do I need a new camera lens?  I'm missing the cinematography and nuance because my attention is elsewhere. And it isn't just Bond. It is everywhere.

I've spent a year reading the story of the British quest for Everest in the years after the Great War. Into the Silence demands attention. I need to finish it. The writing deserves more attention than I'd give my phone. It is just that good. But my phone is always there! Always bright and shiny and new.

What's the solution? Other than feeling like a failure at the 18% mark of 2026? I still have 82% of the year to correct course. 

1. I've put a book downstairs by the couch where I cuddle up with the dog. The Dig Tree on the exploration of the center of the Australian continent in the 1860's is there to give an alternative to phone. 
2. I need to finish Into the Silence and feel the satisfaction that comes from completing something big. Then find the next big book to read! 
3. Start working down my list of personal chores. I have a long list of things I need to do so that the bikes are ready for the outdoor cycling season that will hopefully start soon. I have decades of digital photos to organize and last year's travel photos of Egypt along with France and Northern Ireland to process, print or post.
4. Get on the house projects that simply require "doing". Last year was my first year of  true retirement and ChatGPT helped me reflect on the year and remarked it was a year of decompression from a high stress career. That was a spot-on assessment.  Now that I've decompressed, however, it is time to start taking action in life rather than coasting through the days.

We'll circle back in a few months and see how this feels.

What are your solutions? Comment on this post and let me know!

Thinking about 19 year old Kevin

We set out in 36°, bundled up for a winter ride, in Tucson. In February. Mike parked the truck in a school lot where we hoped the gates wouldn't shut for the 3 hours we'd be riding. We rolled into the rising sun, blinding. I put Bryn between me and the sun hoping he would find the right line. The air was as brisk as Wisconsin, but the wheels were rolling smoothly on the pavement and the surrounding desert spread infinitely around us. 2000 feet of climbing the day before had this Midwesterner feeling the previous 53 miles.

The destination was McKenzie Ranch Trails Park, a 1700 acre park with multiple trails including 2 mountain bike loops adding up to 10 miles. We finally reached the turn off for the park and faced a mile or two of gravel washboard that pounded the hands and arms and made me think of Paris-Roubaix coming up in April. I hoped this would not be an indication of things to come, as we were surrounded by prickly pear, thorny brush on all sides, and rocks — rocks the size of fists, heads, bodies, everywhere. A wreck wouldn't be just road rash, it would involve extricating thorns from flesh, and we'd already made a pledge riding across Saguaro National Park the day before that if you had thorns you couldn't pull them out until photographed for posterity.

On gravel bikes, we chose the 6.6 mile Kozen trail and hoped our gravel bikes would stand up to the single track.

McKenzie Ranch Trails Park - our route based on my Strava map - the 8 mile ride to the trailhead not shown

The riding was technical for me — truly a single line to follow, and if you chose poorly, those thorns were waiting to prod you. Plenty of times I had the back end and front end of the bike having a different conversation than the one I was trying to have with the handlebars. I dabbed my foot plenty of times trying to stay upright as we dropped into depressions, and my hope was that the bike would roll through it, as a broken collarbone or finishing off my rotator cuff seemed at times highly likely.

Half way through the loop it occurred to me! My travel insurance has medical evacuation coverage! If I crashed and was injured, a helicopter could come and rescue me! That properly cheered me up! My thoughts turned to less injurious scenarios and I absorbed myself in my line on the course and the opportunity I was given.

And after such preamble I get to the subject. Thinking about 19 year old Kevin. And 19 year old Bryn. We'd race our bikes up and down the bike lane on Wright Street in Champaign, sprinting for Altgeld Hall and math classes. Pedestrians be damned. We flew across campus as only a 19 year old with but college worries can. What would Kevin and Bryn of 1990 think of us now, 36 years later, still on bikes, still friends, and still having a grand adventure? I think they wouldn't doubt it for a second, and perhaps find a little confidence in that.

We've been through some things. 36 years will take its toll and you'll have good years and bad years. The freedom we discovered south of Assembly Hall on roads without names and only numbers, the smell of the South Farms, a quick trip for me to the Taco Bell on University. I still have Bryn's college bike hanging in my garage. The Cannondale was raced by Bryn, me and Stephen, too. I still have that Schwinn that raced up and down Wright Street, to FAR and ISR and all over campus. 

I think 19 year old Kevin would be pretty happy that things turned out differently than he ever imagined. I think he'd be happier still to know that a lifetime later, he would still be going out for a ride with Bryn and feeling that same stupid satisfaction in the pain and immense joy in just being alive on a Saturday morning in February in Tucson in 36°.

I have to give a special attribution to Fair Wheel Bikes in Tucson near the University of Arizona Campus. I love bike shops, but will say this one, with their collection of 80's cycling ephemera and bicycles is pretty special. If you're visiting Tucson and need a bike rental, you cannot go wrong with the service and shop here. Thanks, guys! My Trek gravel ike ran flawlessly for 76 miles.

Decidedly Not an Identity Crisis

I never identified with my career. I wasn’t tied to being an engineer, or a leader, inventor, mentor, or manager. Since I graduated from college some years ago now, I’ve been fortunate to have had just two “real” jobs. I often loved them, sometimes hated them, and most days just showed up and gave my best effort—but the job wasn’t me. It never was.

I raced bikes. I traveled. I wrote poetry. I took thousands of photos that largely nobody has seen. I’ve had dogs pass through my life and have been fortunate to have a good wife who tolerated all of it.

If we remove “work” from the last twenty-plus years, we’re left with those things. We have scribbled notebooks, hundreds upon hundreds of trip itineraries, and mountains of unprocessed photos capturing it all.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that, at the core of it, I’m simply a traveler, a writer, and a photographer—but I’ve largely kept it under cover, with work providing the way to get paid for what I enjoyed doing.

When circumstances changed in the job, the travel dried up, and I was left writing regulatory documents, it was time to step off the merry-go-round. I was left with a year of pondering: with work gone, who was I really? And it was clear.

Sitting here at SNA, waiting for a flight to ORD followed by a drive home in the morning, it’s time to get this started—to share the things I love, and probably more importantly, the reasons why.

Some things in our lives have been there so long that we never question why we love them, and we have a hard time explaining to a friend at the bar the reasons behind our passions. I’m not saying there needs to be a reason. Phones are everywhere, watches should be obsolete, and the car should have finished off the bicycle like it did the horse—but still, the heart loves what it loves.

I can’t guarantee that it will all make sense. I’m not sure my thoughts will move in a straight line. But if I write it, and you read it, then at the end of the day I can call myself a writer. I suppose I already can, based on the dozens of user manuals I’ve written over the years—but other than to technical writers, would anyone really count that? Come on. Nobody reads the instructions!

And so, next time, we’ll explore a passion—and I’ll try to explain why.