Seeing More Family Onesie-Twosie

Thanksgiving '24 Travelog #7
Front Royal, VA - Tue, 26 Nov 2024, 1:30pm

We're still in northern Virginia, still visiting with relatives. It's a stretched out process because many of my relatives we're only able to see one or two at a time because they're a) spread out and b) still working this week so we have to fit things around their schedules. And today is another stretched-out day of driving, as we're currently in Front Royal, about 60 miles west of our hotel that's about 10 miles west of Washington, DC, and will make a few other stops on our drive before the day is done.

Today we met my niece, "Bettie", and her boyfriend "Kai", for lunch. Bettie and Kai are young adults, 18-19 years old, working entry level jobs as they figure out paths forward in life. That's a jump forward as the last time I saw Bettie was 5 years ago, and she was a little kid then. I mean, she still thought poop jokes were funny. (Though to be fair, so did everyone age 5-75 except her dad.)

We'd seen Bettie's older sisters, Tessa and Mattie, just a few days before. We talked about that, including how Mattie with her infant son Dean makes me feel old. The child's grandma is 7 years younger than me!

We also talked about family situations. You might recall from blogs I wrote a few years ago that Tessa has a very strained relationship with her parents. Well, so do Mattie and Bettie now. 😖 Tessa and Mattie have moved out and live with their partners. Bettie still has one foot in her parents' house and one foot in with Kai's family, and she works her schedule to minimize interaction with her own parents. It's tough when you can't yet afford to live on your own and you can't live with your parents without hearing a daily screed about how your behavior is immoral and your boyfriend is the wrong race.

Four Years on Dreamwidth, 13 on LiveJournal. What I Wrote About this Year.

It's my 4 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 13 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 2791 blogs in 4 years and 702 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 1.92 posts per day this past year. I can also see which tags I've used most frequently in that time:

Top Topics, Past 4 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	466
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	345
3	Waterfalls	224
4	Coronavirus	223
5	Weather	214
6	TV	212

There are a few changes among the top 5 compared to last year's ranking. "In Beauty I Walk" remains in the lead, and "Planes Trains And Automobiles" remains at #2. Coronavirus dropped a spot to #4 while Waterfalls climbed to #3. And Weather edged out TV for the #5 spot. (TV is now #6.)

I'm certainly happy to see Coronavirus recede into the rearview mirror. It looks like by this time next year, unless something goes horribly wrong, Coronavirus will disappear from the Top 5.

Weather seems like a lame thing to creep up into the leader board. I mean, people talking about the weather is kind of insipid. Blogging about it seems like the same. But the Weather tag got a lot of use this year because there were simply so many times that weather became a factor in something I wanted to do— sometimes an opportunity, but more often an obstacle. And many times it was extreme weather I was writing about— which I call out is happening more frequently, and will continue to happen more frequently, because of human-caused climate change.

Speaking of things dropping a spot— or maybe moving up a spot— let's take a look how tags ranked in the past 12 months, since the last time I reported these stats.

Top Topics, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	112
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	102
3	New Zealand	77
4	Weather	67
5	Waterfalls	65
6	Dining Out	60
7	Australia	56
8	Taking it Easy	55
9	TV	52
10	Job	51
11	No Rest for the Wicked	48
12	Let's Go Shopping!	43
13	Memory Lane	40
14	Road Trip!	37
15	Being Sick Sucks	36
16 (tie)	Frequent Flyer Points	34
16 (tie)	Money	34
18 (tie)	Video	33
18 (tie)	Family	33
20 (tie)	Alaska	31

The Top 10 list contains a number of the usual suspects but it does have a few new entries.

• New Zealand came out of nowhere (well, technically, it came out of the Southern Hemisphere 😂) to notch 3rd place with 77 journal entries. That's all from a two-week trip we made to New Zealand in April. 77 blogs... and still I've got maybe a dozen more in the backlog!


• Similarly, Australia stormed onto the list, landing at 7th place with 56 blog posts. Those are all from a trip we took in late December.


• Job (my current job) isn't a new topic but I did write about it more this year than in past years, so it made the top 10, barely.

I enumerated the list out to 20 spots this year to show where some of last year's top 10 fell to as well as some that almost made it. Alas, even cutting the list at 20 leaves out some of the story. Three topics tied for 20th, and three more were only 1-2 posts short of making the list.

• I show Alaska in spot 20 because it's an almost new tag. I finally got to Alaska this year!


• Pool Life is technically tied for 20th. It's a new tag I created this year to describe the joy of lounging around the pool. I was inspired by a few weeks of hot weather and one stay-home vacation when we decided to spend a few hours at the pool every day.


• D&D is a topic that finished just one post shy of making the top-20 list. I had hoped it'd make the list so I could write about why it made the list. It didn't, so I'll just tell you anyway. 🤣 Thanks to starting a new game late last year I more than tripled, in one year, the amount I've ever written about Dungeons & Dragons. Considering I ran a long-term game for many years in the past, that's telling. (What it tells is that I wasn't so inspired to write about my LT game.)

Finally, what happened to Coronavirus? On the basis of the past 12 months it not only dropped out of the top 5, it did not make the top 10 or even top 25. It was tagged to a paltry 11 blogs this year, coming in all the way down at 65th place. Good riddance.