Sometimes life is the impetus for the blog, and other times it is the obstacle. For more months than I can really remember, it has definitely been the latter. Given that this website is a passion project, it is reasonable that this sort of forced hiatus will happen from time to time. Life, after all, exists primarily beyond these digital Verona walls. However, I have missed this simple indulgence over the past months, so I am trying to make the time required to breath a little life back into this blog. The global pandemic currently confining and isolating us may have restricted our ability to get fully lost in nature, but at least it can't stop that experience here.
Long before Covid19 was even on the international radar, my family transitioned into an intense series of events that thoroughly overwhelmed us. We unexpectedly found ourselves interested in purchasing a new home to provide a better environment and school system for our son. Unfortunately this led to a lot of work searching for the right home, rapidly finishing remodels on our existing home, forcing half of our belongings into storage so we could get our house on the market, trudging our way through the endless decisions involved in building and financing a home, struggling with the Veterans Administration that lost my service records, and then moving 10 years of collected possessions into said new home all while tending to a wild one-year-old still adjusting to the ways of his wayward parents. It was still a good time filled with family and friends, and the results are certainly worth the effort in the end, so I have little room to complain really. However, it was also a very stressful time, so I didn’t have any free time to devote to non-essential projects. I had hoped that the workload would ebb as we settled into the new home, but our state of constant work has continued until the point where we are now. We are slightly more stable with primarily small projects and unpacking to slowly whittle down, but somehow we feel as unstable as ever since we have been self-quarantined for what has been nearly a month now and counting (the entire family got sick a week prior to any of the quarantine measures). Perhaps if my wife and I were still just a married couple, I might have all the time in the world right now to devout to whatever I wish…but we’re not. We’re the parents of a wonderful, smart, and highly energetic young boy who is nearing 2 and definitely doesn’t understand why mommy and daddy need to work so much. The family time is great, but we’re definitely losing some degree of sanity with each passing day as we try to juggle everything. All that said though, we’re largely healthy, still working, and surviving just fine. I really can’t complain given the plight of millions in the post-Covid19 United States. We are certainly one of the lucky ones, and for that we are eternally grateful. All excuses aside, I am looking forward to delving into new work, even if it only occurs late at night when the "toddlersaurus" has finally gone to sleep and the daily chores have been completed. The bigger issue is how to address a few oversights I made back in summer of 2019. At some point I failed to notice that I had forgotten the final posts of the Big Bend trip. It is an important visual and literary end to the story as a whole, so I am disinclined to just drop it. However, I also have one more post of the NASA launch that I was finishing up when we suddenly decided to commit to our house hunting/house selling adventure. In short, everything is out of order and I don't have a good way to rectify it right now with the tools at my disposal. In order to keep at least one story reasonably in order (ignoring the random Apollo 11 Anniversary that snuck in there), I will publish the last post of the AA2 launch first (likely Thursday, April 16th), and then transition back to the lasts posts of Big Bend. I will add links to the adjoining Big Bend and AA2 posts so it’s easy to transition in the correct order if someone is trying to read each story linearly. Since they are in different categories though, the posts should show up in the correct order within their corresponding categories under the Photoblog tab. After I get the missing posts out of the way, we can finally get on to new content (of which there is an ever-growing amount). I can't express how much I appreciate everyone who continues to support my little artistic endeavor. I hope it brings a little happiness to at least a few people’s day, especially as we remain diligently quarantined in an effort to combat the incessant spread of the Covid19 pandemic. I hope everyone is staying home and staying safe, so if you can’t go out in person right now due to social-distancing requirements, at least you can enjoy this proxy for now. © 2020 Shaun C Tarpley
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