I last posted to Coffeespoons a year ago. Well, I’m back. Sort of.
Over the last year, there has been a lot going on in my family and personal life. Suffice it to say that all’s now relatively well. But the last 12 months forced me to prioritise some things over other things, and a daily(ish) blog about information design and data visualisation did not quite make the cut. And over all that time I also picked up a few new interests and hobbies, the most significant being photography.
Nevertheless I still enjoy information design. So I’m back. Though I doubt I will be posting every workday. After all, that’s when I have to go through my photographs and the other things I work upon nowadays. But, I don’t want to completely neglect this blog.
To ease back into the process, I updated a county map of the United States I last updated at the end of 2019, before the pandemic struck.
But I can’t really say I’ve travelled that far away from Philadelphia over the last year. The only work trip was to Chicago and for holidays I’ve travelled north to the Berkshires and New England several times. I’ve also added Providence and crossed off Rhode Island from the states I’ve visited. Finally, I’ve spent some time working remote from hotel rooms allowing me to watch baseball in nearby Minor League ballparks, Salisbury, Maryland’s Arthur Perdue Stadium, among others.
What remains abundantly clear are the two major phases of my life to date. I was born and raised in the greater Delaware Valley (Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania, and southern New Jersey) and lived eight years in the Midwest (Chicago). And what connects all the journeys I’ve made from those home bases, if you will, is the tenuous county-wide tether stretching along I-80 across Indiana and Ohio into I-76 in Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately I still haven’t made it beyond the United States yet post-pandemic—hopefully that will begin changing in 2024—and so I have no updates for that map.
I cannot quite say when the next post will be. I don’t think it will be 12 months. But will it be monthly? Weekly? I can’t quite say. I doubt I will return to daily posting, because as those who know me well know, that was an enormous amount of time I spent every week preparing, writing, and posting content. But I also know well that a regular update frequency is critical to a blog, so that’s a thing I will be thinking about as 2023 begins to fade into autumn and winter.
Stay tuned.
Credit for the piece is mine.
