Unplugging

After having striped our earthly possessions down to the bare essentials, packed them into a truck, cleaned our house, sold our car and flew to California, we are now decompressing in Fresno. After a very stressful and hectic few weeks it feels great to relax and make time for watching movies, swimming, running, hanging out, playing with Quinn. Next week we are off to the mountains for some serious porch-sitting, beer-drinking and possible hiking. Soon enough we'll be pitched back into the uncertainty of moving and change, but for now life is calm.

Relatedly, I am also taking this opportunity to simplify my inbox, under the assumption that my life over the next few months won't have me chained to a computer screen at all times. Over the years I seem to have accumulated a large number of email listservs and rss feeds and it has been quite liberating to let some (if not all) of them go. The ratio of wheat to chaff in my inbox has gone way up. Part of the issue is that for my previous job I served as a kind of human aggregator for a large number of blogs, news sources, activist groups and other information flows.

I will confess to finding information somewhat addicting, and with the internet there will always be more and more and more interesting and important things to read. But no one yet has invented more hours in the day in which to read it all. So it is nice to step back and simplify a bit, before the inevitable information creep starts back up again.