![\"thegoogle\"](\"http:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/thegoogle1.jpg\" "\\"thegoogle\\"")
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Because I have a rich online life, I sometimes have to nudge myself to have an equally rich offline life. I’ve been finishing a few more books lately, and yesterday I went for a drive. I have a family friend, who turns out to be a relative, who is 96 and who I just learned was a sort of neighbor. That is, he lives in Vermont which is neighbor enough. I made a plan to go see him saying I was going to be more or less in the area and made a plan, then, to be in the area. My relative is Irving Adler<\/a>, my second cousin twice removed. He is 96 and he has strong opinions about health care<\/a>. I spent some time visting with him and then did some catching up on the 251 project I’ve been working on for the past five years or so.<\/p>\n To catch you<\/em> up, I want to visit all of Vermont’s 251 towns. I’m 90-someodd percent there. Before there was a widget for everything, I made my own web page<\/a> to track my progress. I have a Delorme gazetteer that I cover with highlighter pen to track where I’ve been. Now there’s a widget<\/a> that sort of does what I want but like all widgets, it’s imperfect. Through some concerted efforts and marathon driving, I went to sixteen new towns yesterday, though I missed three — Middletown Springs, Somerset and Windham — that assure I’ll be going back. The widget says I am 94% complete. The widget does not track gores and grants.<\/p>\n The gazetter is also imperfect. Even though I crosschecked with Google maps to see that the road that they said was a road was, in fact, a road, it was not a road. It was<\/em> a road up to a point and then the road became a riverbed and then the riverbed became a footpath for goats. I turned around, which is awkward when you are in a car on a goat footpath. The nice people with 4×4 trucks, beer and few teeth were incredibly nice to me as I drove back past them and asked politely if the road I had been trying to drive on was, in fact, a road. “Not for that car!” they told me. I think AWD is sort of hot shit until I hit roads like this.<\/p>\n You can see my rough route in these two google maps (down<\/a>, up<\/a>). I checked my email twice during the day, once from the burrito place and once when I pulled over to take some photos of a nice looking lake. I pulled out my laptop to use my EVDO card to “check my web” and I saw that there was a nice four-bar signal coming from … someplace, called linksys. Now I’ve got 2-4 towns to visit in each quadrant of the state including the vexing Lewis which I swear can’t be reached by road. If anyone would like to go on a doomed hiking trip with me sometime in early spring, do give me a call. I can’t guarantee success, but there’s a 90-someodd percent chance of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because I have a rich online life, I sometimes have to nudge myself to have an equally rich offline life. I’ve been finishing a few more books lately, and yesterday I went for a drive. I have a family friend, who turns out to be a relative, who is 96 and who I just learned […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[400,83,402,4,15,399,401],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-400","tag-jessamyn","tag-lewis","tag-me","tag-vermont","tag-vt","tag-vt251","h-entry","hentry"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}