The GeekHiker

So, this popped up on my WordPress dashboard notifications a couple of days ago.

Wow.  Six years.  I started this blog six bloody years ago.  Where does the time go?

It makes you think, you know?

Haven’t been posting as much this week. Lots of stuff going on. Biggest concern, of course, is finding a new job. I really should be updating the blog more often, though, especially considering I’ve cited it in a couple of job applications. (Doing that without having completely cleaned and organized the old stuff does entail some risk, I suppose.  Well, hiring managers, if you’re reading this you may as well know up front: I’m human, with all the frailties and fears as anyone else. Hopefully you’ll see that as a positive rather than a detriment when considering me. 🙂 )

An anniversary, though? Well, that’s the kind of thing that just makes you stop and think. Anniversaries do that kind of thing.

Hard not to compare who I was then to who I am now. I’ve gone from a single guy who had few friends and no life and who was stuck at a job he hated to a guy who has friends around the world, is currently looking for the next interesting career opportunity (and is more confident in is qualifications than ever before), and even though its a bit slow at the moment (stuck in a town where none of my social structure exists), has a life.

(As a side note, if anybody knows of the perfect job for a writer/photographer/network administrator/hiker, please contact me. I’m not above begging.)

Not to say that everything is perfect (have I mentioned the unemployment thing?). I miss my social structure in L.A., though I’ve made a couple of friends here (even though I may move away at any moment). I feel hesitant to take advantage of the location too much, despite such good access to the Bay Area and the Sierras, since without regular income spending money on gas and park passes seems like an extravagance.

Bigger than all that has been some unexpected latent fallout from the trauma that happened at the end of the trip. Is there anything worse than drama that shows up months after something happens?  (There is, of course.  I was going for a little pathos with the text there.)

I’m dealing with it. Awareness is half the battle. And I’m seeing how things are tied together: how what happened affected me, how they’ve ended up serving as a mental block to writing about my travels or edit the photos from the entire trip. Maybe I need to write about it, get it out of my system. But I’m not quite ready to tackle that. Yet.

* * *

Not all is bad, and I refuse to end this post on a negative note.

Long-time readers may recall my post about confronting new fears. A post that ended with a planned return trip to Melbourne, Australia to see a girl.

And I did return. I spent a month there, then returned to the road, finished my travels, and returned home.

And while, at this six year anniversary, I have no idea what year seven holds for myself or for the blog, I know that today I am impatiently counting down the hours.

The Australian arrives here tomorrow.

What will ultimately happen?  Who knows?  I’m guessing blogging might stay sparse for a few weeks, at the very least. Sorry about that.

Actually, I’m not really that sorry.

😉