Today my wife and I attended the celebration of life (memorial service) of her aunt.

It's been many years since I've had games on my smartphone. It's not that I don't enjoy video games, it's that I enjoy them too much.

The past couple years I have been mailing Christmas cards to family and loved ones and I plan to keep doing so in the future.

Listening to one of my music playlists on random, I was reminded of the existence of a beautiful piece of music performed by the supremely talented Norwegian soprano Sissel.

Like many of us in the year 2022, I spend most of my weekdays on a computer. It's how I work to support my family.

But then what do I do in my spare time? Most of the time, I get on my computer. I watch TV shows or Movies, play video games (Minecraft these days), listen to music, catch up on social media, write blogs, etc. I do read books, spend time with my family, and other non-digital things, but my current ratio of connected to disconnected free time is extremely skewed towards connected.

I enjoy writing letters. I also enjoy receiving them. Emails and texts have their place, but they can never take the place of letters, postcards, and greeting cards.

Why would something so mundane warrant a blog post? I'll answer that question with a question: who uses an alarm clock anymore?

Earlier this month, I went on a trip with my family to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We stayed at a campground situated between the two parks. We use an MVNO (Ting) for our cell phone service to save money and, therefore, had no service at our camp. In fact, during the few days we spent exploring that magnificent part of the world, we had little or no service at all.

A principle is “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.”

We all have deeply-held principles by which we live our lives. Some of those principles may be innate – a part of us as long as we can remember. Some principles were taught to us by our parents or families. Other principles we adopt throughout our lives as we learn and grow.

I've been using Mastodon – a free and open source, decentralized social media platform and a compelling alternative to corporate-controlled platforms like Facebook and Twitter – regularly since June of 2019. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse – a collection of inter-connected apps developed around ActivityPub, an open, decentralized social networking protocol.