As I write this entry it will be my 80th blog this year. A few minutes ago I did a quick check of what I was writing about in each month this year. What is funny to me is some of those things I did earlier this year seem like 2-3 years ago now to me. Part of that is the constant blogging and videos I have put up that make some of the older stuff this year seem so long ago.
I was going to write a bunch of stuff about the economy and how I could tell things were not looking so good earlier this year when I traveled. Gas was an issue, but the overall economy is what everyone is concerned about now. To make this short, in what I experienced this year, lots of things that used to be free are no longer free, and small fees have turned into bigger fees. After I came home earlier this year from a trip I got a call from an opinion poll asking me what I thought about state parks. In California funding has been cut, and the opinion poll guy wanted to know what I thought of the three possibilities for raising revenue for state parks. Keep in mind that I just encountered all sorts of new fees on a trip and back. Each of the three possibilities were areas that had recently been given tax hikes and now they were thinking of raising them even more. It was not the right time for him to be calling me on that. I ended up thinking that if this was the best they could come up with there are some serious problems coming.
Originally, I had about 3-4 long paragraphs written about the above issue, but I did not want to make this blog entry too long. These type of economic issues do affect this blog some since I can not just take off to anywhere I want all the time. I did a bunch of stuff in 2008, but I do not have any far away (longer than an hour drive) stuff I plan to do for a while. This is not an issue of having material to post pictures or videos of since I still have tons of stuff I can show.
I was going to say some stuff about youtube and how I regard my use of it in the future, but I think I will wait a few weeks before I do that. As of right now I am taking the next few weeks off and then I will get back to posting new pictures and videos. It was a busy year for this blog, but I do not have the intention of trying to outdo the amount of entries I did this year for 2009.
So, thanks for all the e-mails, the comments, and the views. Believe me, I have a lot I still need to get out over the next few months just based on what I did this last year.
