Ever since I was three, my dad has planned an annual camping trip up in the mountains for fathers to take their sons. It changes a little bit every year and the group is always a little different. But my dad, Uncle, cousin and I have been going for 18 years and I’ve been yet to miss one.

Day 0

This year, I friend of mine suggested him and I go up one day early. Since today I’m considering a bonus day, I’m calling day 0 since the rest of the group won’t be joining us until tomorrow.

Carter and I loaded up after he got off work today. We had already had a sport in mind of where we would be camping but when we got there, there was already someone there. Luckily, I knew of another great spot that would work for the two of us but it’s not big enough for the whole group.

Tomorrow, we are going to drive back down to the large spot and ask the guy staying their when he is going to leave. Hopefully, he is just staying tonight and will be gone in the morning. If not, we will either ask him to move considering it’s just one guy taking up one of the largest camp site or we will try to make another site work.

I look forward to the rest of the group joining us tomorrow.

Day 1

Today was a pretty uneventful day. since we got to bed so late last night, Carter and I slept in until about 10am this morning. We cooked eggs for breakfast and then hopped in the car.

On the way in yesterday, we had seen a sign saying that one of the roads we drove on was going to be closed starting today and drove to see if we were going to need to find an alternative route for the rest of the group. Luckily, it was closed farther down the road and it was not going to affect us.

On the way down the mountain, we also check to see when the guy in the camp site we wanted was going to leave. Unfortunately, he said he was going to be there a few more days. He was super nice and offered to move to a smaller spot and let our large group take the big one but we did not want to bother him so we made another spot work.

The rest of the group made good time and showed up around 3pm. One of the guys showed up with less than half of the firewood he started out with left on the back of his truck. It was actually pretty funny.

For dessert, we had dump cake and homemade ice cream which was amazing!

Nothing super exciting happened today but it was still a great day. I’m getting up at 5am tomorrow morning to see the sunrise from the top of the mountain. As it is already 12am, I better get to sleep.

On May 18th, my cousin left Delaware on foot to walk across the United States following the American Discovery Trail. His brother, my brother, I decided to plan a trip to meet up with him in West Virginia and cap with him.

We headed out of town all loaded up on Saturday June 3rd. It took us longer than expected but we arrived at Indian Head Campground just outside of Maysville, WV, around 1:30pm. After dropping my teardrop, we headed down the road about 10 miles to puck up Ben since he had not quite made it to the campsite.

After we brought Ben back to the campsite and got our stuff setup, Ben and Carson wanted to go rock climbing at a near by preserve (Bear Rock Preserve). It was only about 25mins away. I brought my camera along to get some photos of them climbing but also came away with some amazing landscape photos. Here are a few of the best ones.

We got back to the campsite and started preparing dinner. I helped out some but Carson and Levi seemed to enjoy cooking and so I stepped back.

Almost every trip we forget at least something and this time we forgot the oil for the griddle. We made do with the grease from the steaks and a few pieces of bacon we stole from breakfast. In the end though, our steak fajitas turned out amazing! Great work Carson and Levi!

The rain held off the whole day but just as we were winding down and about to go to bed, it started to rain. We were fairly well protected by the trees we were under but we could hear thunder off in the distance.

On Sunday evening, we cooked another amazing meal (eggs and bacon), enjoyed each others company, packed up, and then dropped Ben off where we picked him up the day prior before heading home.

Overall, Indian Head Campground was a pleasant place to stay. At night it got a little loud because it is located quite close to a main road. If you are planning to stay at the campground you should not expect much in the way of amenities. There is WiFi that works ok if you walk a few hundred feet from where we camped and there is a place to throw trash. But as far as bathrooms and showers go, you need to bring your own.

This is something my parents have been telling me for years but until now, I did not agree with them. After reducing the notifications I get on my phone and realizing what a relief it has been, I’m considering turning off notifications for all texts and instant messages.

My logic for it is, if someone needs my immediate attention, they should just call me. Yes, they will lose some convenience of just being able to type out a quick message and send it and instead have to call and wait for me to answer, but I think it should take some effort to interrupt what I’m doing. If they are unwilling to call me, the situation is really not urgent so they can wait until I actively choose to pull out my phone and check my texts.

This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I’m actually glad I waited this long as my opinion on it has changed slightly.

The post I was going to write was about why I pay for subscription-based software on a yearly basis if available. But something has happened since then. I switched software, and here’s why that’s significant.

After using the note taking app Bear for about 9 months, I started realizing I wanted a platform independent way of taking notes. All of my notes were stored in a way where they can only be accessed via a single app (Bear) on devices made by a single company (Apple). Since I had purchased Bear Pro approximately 9 months earlier, I had three months remaining before my subscription was set to renew. I cancelled my subscription and I started looking for alternatives.

Once I had found what I was looking for, I started taking all my notes in the new system. Why would I write notes in the old app whose days are numbered. Literally, since I had already cancelled my subscription the days left on my yearly plan were counting down.

And here lies the problem. When I switched from one thing to another, I usually do so preemptively. And most of the time, I give myself more time to switch than is necessary. In this example, I payed for an entire year and saved about 16% but ended up wasting about 25% of the subscription because I switched to a different app before the plan expired. I would have been better off paying monthly rather than yearly.

Now don’t get me wrong, yearly does have it’s advantages. It did keep me using Bear for 9 months instead of jumping back and forth, trying out different apps, because I had already paid for Bear Pro. If you know you are going to use something for at least a year, paying for a whole year in advance can save you money. But in general, I think monthly subscriptions are the way to go because they are, in my opinion, cheaper on average and offer more flexibility.

You Need A Budget (Affiliate Link) is an example of where I pay yearly because I know I’m going to use it for a while. And I also want to force myself to stick with it because of how important it is in my life. Finances is usually not an area in your life to experiment with.

Over the past several months, I’ve been planning to ditch the iPhone and flash a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS. One of the major challenges with switching is the lack of push notifications on most apps on GrapheneOS (unless you install Google Play Services, which I don’t want to do for privacy reasons).

While at first this was a problem for me, I quickly started realizing over half the notifications I get on a daily basis I don’t actually care about. And most of the notifications I actually act on are from just a few selected apps.

Even though I have postponed my abandonment of my iPhone 13 mini, I have gone down a rabbit-trail turning off notifications for almost apps on my phone. The apps I do have notifications turned on, I have them just set to badges so I can check on anything requiring my attention at my convenience.

Even though I’m only into my new notification stripped-down phone a few days, I’m really enjoying it.

I don’t understand why Material UI has become so popular. Today at work, I was doing some research on Vue UI Libraries and the majority of the ones I found were implementing it.

In my opinion it is actually not very pleasing to use but maybe that is just because it so heavily used by all of Google’s app and I so strongly dislike Google after all of the privacy issues that have come out.