This Makes No Sense At All

Jon is a San Francisco columnist of some renown, and in the ancient past, (he is almost as old as I am), he wrote about those tasks you do that are necessary and important, in place of those tasks requiring immediate completion. i.e. you have company coming in two hours, and you decide that this is the perfect time to finally clean out the garage. Ever since that column, we have called such tasks "Jon Carroll Tasks", of which this post is one. I still have seven or eight hours till people arrive, so I am thinking about weed whipping the back slope, doing a blog post on my efforts to compare satellite phone rentals, catching up on the household budget ... more such tasks will come as I have less time remaining. We have a couple of major trips coming up, first wrapping up the GR 653 into Puenta la Reina, and then after a few weeks of intermission, wrapping up the Pacific Crest Trail through the State of Washington into Canada. Both of these trips have a lot of little details...

I have been watching with dismay as our local newspapers consolidate and/or vanish, local news disappearing with each change. I am seeing all too many last columns from favorite columnists. One of the hiking blogs I follow is Tom Mangan's Two Heel Drive , a local newspaperman, he gives some insider's views of the industry. His travails have prompted some thoughts of my own. Our local papers are the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. At one time we subscribed to both, but the Tribune stopped coming months ago, and their customer service - entirely online and devoid of human contact of course, says we are not subscribers. ok, my favorite columnist there, Brenda Payton, was gone, so we said forget the Tribune, the Chronicle will be enough. Now the Trib sends us a renewal notice?! Anyway, our budget is getting a little tight, and the Chron is now more than $30 per month, and the Trib is $24 per year, so we are thinking of switching just to the Trib, even though w...