I'm sitting at my local airport as I write this. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to be about, so I guess we'll have to find out together.

This airport is quite small compared to the usual huge international ones. It is a small country, to be sure, so maybe it's expected. Anyway, usually my flights depart from the "old wing", but today my flight will go out of the "new wing". I'd come by here on other occasions as I was stretching my legs, but never before had I sat here and taken the time to really admire the differences. In style and structure, it's very much the same as the old parts of the airport; it even has the same ruddy carpet, though it definitely looks, shall we say, less lived-in. The thing that surprised me the most is that it has proper restaurants, almost all of which are entirely empty! This morning I had breakfast at one of the usual "fast food" places near the airport entrance, but next time I'm here I'll definitely come and grab something to eat at these new places.

There aren't a lot of people around. Unsurprising, considering it's very early on a Sunday. Well, I say unsurprising, but really, how would I know, it's not like I come here all that often! It is starting to fill up now, though most people seem to be in "the old" part of the airport. My mind keeps coming back to this idea. I wonder how often "new things" are created that end up unused because of unknown reasons? Maybe just bad luck?

That reminds me of a restaurant/cafe that opened a couple of years ago near my house. They put in so much effort into making the place attractive, made some big (and colorful) notice boards, and even installed a huge playground to attract parents with small kids. Everyone I know who has gone says it's really nice and has good food. I never went though, and now I will no longer have the chance because they closed it a few weeks ago.

Why didn't I go? I don't know. I guess I just never felt the compulsion to go. I assume this is how it was for all the other people who didn't go, ultimately leading to the business's own demise. Maybe it just wasn't the right thing for the specific place and time it found itself in, no matter the effort of the owners. I hope whatever venture they dedicate themselves to next bears them fruit.

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I'm sitting close to my gate, though not quite there yet. I guess a smarter person would be using the time to walk around, move their legs a bit before being bound on a multi-hour international flight. That's what I usually do, but for some reason today I just felt the compulsion to take out my PC and write. I guess part of it is because I've been catching up with some blogs today, an activity that always inspires me to write. More specifically, I've been reading a malfunctioning alien-human hybrid's blog, which viscerally reminded me how lucky we are that we can share our experiences online. I feel it's almost a responsibility to say what we have to say, even though we ourselves might not feel it is especially worth saying. What matters most is that we all contribute, in our own unique way, to the tapestry of human experience. Wouldn't it be nice if we all did so?

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I'm traveling to the US for work. These trips are always fun because it's a sort of all-paid mini vacation. It is true it's for work, but... parents of small kids will understand 😅 I do feel a bit bad about leaving my wife with both kids for a whole week! I'll have to find a way to make it up to her when I get back. We joke that someday she'll take a long vacation to somewhere far away like Thailand and leave me with both kids for a month. Maybe that's not such a bad idea?

Anyway. Since I won't have to worry about kids and will probably have most of my evenings free, I hope that means I can get some extra writing done during the next week. I know I've been slacking a bit on the rate of publishing (which perhaps is not such a bad thing for you, the reader), and while I accept that the new rate is probably best for both me and you, I would really like to avoid it slipping any further. I somehow felt that writing every day for those first fifty posts really kept me on my feet, observant about things around and inside me lest I miss anything worth writing about. But now that I've relaxed my expectations, I feel I'm slowly sliding into laziness, which is something I would like to avoid.

To be fair, I've also been really distracted by "roguelikes"! I wrote about Caves of Qud some days ago, and I was greatly mistaken on some of the points I made. I said the world felt "sparse", but now that I've played some more I realize that what I felt was "confused" (extremely so), which I've come to understand was actually the developers' intention! CoQ is going great. My character contracted an infectious fungal disease on its arm, and then I passed it on to Man Opener! Man Opener then passed it again to me, so now both my arm and back have mushrooms growing out of them. So I (sadly, even though I think it's for the good of both of us) ended up leaving Man Opener behind at one of the villages. He's probably happy, though; I left him in a hookah tent with some other cool NPCs. I plan to come back for him once I've found the cure to this specific infection.

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Well, perhaps I should go and stretch my legs a bit :) my plane will start boarding soon, and I would also like to do a quick bathroom visit before getting on.

Live and drink.